Events

Date: 15 April 2026   Time: 10:30 - 13:00

Location: G2 Engineering Building. Mile End Campus. E1 4NS Map 

Fredrik Dahlqvist will be presenting Tropical Geometry of Deep Neural Networks by Liwen Zhang, Gregory Naitzat and Lek-Heng Lim.

Please RSVP to
Gabryel Thomas Mason-Williams
if you are coming or not so we can get numbers for catering.

Abstract: We establish, for the first time, connections between feedforward neural networks with ReLU activation and tropical geometry — we show that the family of such neural networks is equivalent to the family of tropical rational maps. Among other things, we deduce that feedforward ReLU neural networks with one hidden layer can be characterized by zonotopes, which serve as building blocks for deeper networks; we relate decision boundaries of such neural networks to tropical hypersurfaces, a major object of study in tropical geometry; and we prove that linear regions of such neural networks correspond to vertices of polytopes associated with tropical rational functions. An insight from our tropical formulation is that a deeper network is exponentially more expressive than a shallow network.

Link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.07091