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Is computational power of Neural networks related to the activation function

Submitted by: @import:stackexchange-cs··
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Problem

It is proven that neural networks with rational weights has the computational power of the Universal Turing Machine Turing computability with Neural Nets. From what I get, it seems that using real-valued weights yields even more computational power, though I'm not certain of this one.

However, is there any correlation between the computational power of a neural net and its activation function? For example, if the activation function compares the input against a limit of a Specker sequence (something you can't do with a regular Turing machine, right?), does this make the neural net computationally "stronger"? Could someone point me to a reference in this direction?

Solution

Just a note:

-
rational-weighted recurrent $NN$s having boolean activation functions (simple thresholds) are equivalent to finite state automata (Minsky, "Computation: finite and infinite machines", 1967);

-
rational-weighted recurrent $NN$s having linear sigmoid activation functions are equivalent to Turing Machines (Siegelmann and Sontag, "On the computational power of neural nets", 1995);

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real-weighted recurrent $NN$s having linear sigmoid activation functions are more powerful than Turing Machines (Siegelmann and Sontag, "Analog computation via neural networks", 1993);

but ...

  • real-weighted recurrent $NN$s with Gaussian noise on the outputs cannot recognize arbitrary regular languages (Maass and Sontag, "Analog Neural Nets with Gaussian or Other Common NoiseDistributions Cannot Recognize Arbitrary Regular Languages" , 1995);

Context

StackExchange Computer Science Q#2353, answer score: 15

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