The Loading Problem for Recursive Neural Networks

The present work deals with one of the major and not yet completely understood topics of supervised connectionist models. Namely, it investigates the relationships between the difficulty of a given learning task and the chosen neural network architecture. These relationships have been investigated and nicely established for some interesting problems in the case of neural networks used for processing vectors and sequences, but only a few studies have dealt with loading problems involving graphical inputs. In this paper, we present sufficient conditions which guarantee the absence of local minima of the error function in the case of learning directed acyclic graphs with recursive neural networks. We introduce topological indices which can be directly calculated from the given training set and that allows us to design the neural architecture with local minima free error function. In particular, we conceive a reduction algorithm that involves both the information attached to the nodes and the topology, which enlarges significantly the class of the problems with unimodal error function previously proposed in the literature.