RCC Cannot Compute Certain FSA, Even with Arbitrary Transfer Functions

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 10 (NIPS 1997)

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Authors

Mark Ring

Abstract

Existing proofs demonstrating the computational limitations of Re(cid:173) current Cascade Correlation and similar networks (Fahlman, 1991; Bachrach, 1988; Mozer, 1988) explicitly limit their results to units having sigmoidal or hard-threshold transfer functions (Giles et aI., 1995; and Kremer, 1996). The proof given here shows that for any finite, discrete transfer function used by the units of an RCC network, there are finite-state automata (FSA) that the network cannot model, no matter how many units are used. The proof also applies to continuous transfer functions with a finite number of fixed-points, such as sigmoid and radial-basis functions.