Exponential Lower Bounds for Threshold Circuits of Sub-Linear Depth and Energy

In this paper, we investigate computational power of threshold circuits and other theoretical models of neural networks in terms of the following four complexity measures: size (the number of gates), depth, weight and energy. Here the energy complexity of a circuit measures sparsity of their computation, and is defined as the maximum number of gates outputting non-zero values taken over all the input assignments. As our main result, we prove that any threshold circuit $C$ of size $s$, depth $d$, energy $e$ and weight $w$ satisfies $\log (rk(M_C)) \le ed (\log s + \log w + \log n)$, where $rk(M_C)$ is the rank of the communication matrix $M_C$ of a $2n$-variable Boolean function that $C$ computes. Thus, such a threshold circuit $C$ is able to compute only a Boolean function of which communication matrix has rank bounded by a product of logarithmic factors of $s,w$ and linear factors of $d,e$. This implies an exponential lower bound on the size of even sublinear-depth threshold circuit if energy and weight are sufficiently small. For other models of neural networks such as a discretized ReLE circuits and decretized sigmoid circuits, we prove that a similar inequality also holds for a discretized circuit $C$: $rk(M_C) = O(ed(\log s + \log w + \log n)^3)$.