A Learning Algorithm for Threshold Boolean Networks with Prescribed Fixed Points

arXiv:2609.20298v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a learning algorithm for inferring threshold Boolean networks (TBNs) with a prescribed set of fixed points. The proposed method employs a custom differentiable loss function that jointly enforces fixed point preservation, penalizes spurious attractors, encourages binary outputs, and promotes sparsity through L1 regularization. Applied to the FOS-GRN model of Arabidopsis thaliana, the approach achieved perfect reconstruction (i.e., all 10 desired fixed points and no spurious ones) in 5 out of 30 independent runs, recovering on average 8.53 $\pm$ 0.90 correct fixed points with no spurious attractors. In contrast, standard methods such as the Perceptron and Logistic Regression recovered up to 10 fixed points but introduced between 8 and 31 spurious ones. An additional analysis varying the sparsity coefficient ($\lambda$) confirmed that the method's performance and the structural properties of the inferred networks remain robust within a practical range (up to 0.01) of regularization strengths. Overall, the results demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of the proposed algorithm in capturing meaningful network dynamics under prescribed dynamical constraints.