Stability Analysis of Continuous-Time Recurrent Neural Networks by IQC with Copositive Multipliers

Abstract

This paper addresses the stability analysis problem of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with activation functions being rectified linear units (ReLUs). In particular, we focus on the linear nonegative properties of the input-output signals of ReLUs. To capture these linear properties within the framework of integral quadratic constraint (IQC), we introduce a copositive multiplier constructed from a copositive matrix. This enables us to capture the linear input-output properties of ReLUs in quadratic form. By using the copositive multipliers in additon to existing multipliers, we can reduce the conservatism of the IQC-based stability analysis for RNNs. We also show that the proposed IQC-based stability condition with copositive multipliers can be viewed as an extension of a recently proposed scaled small-gain stability condition based on the L₂₊ induced norm.