On Expressive Power of Quantized Neural Networks under Fixed-Point Arithmetic

Abstract: Research into the expressive power of neural networks typically considers real parameters and operations without rounding error. In this work, we study universal approximation property of quantized networks under discrete fixed-point parameters and fixed-point operations that may incur errors due to rounding. We first provide a necessary condition and a sufficient condition on fixed-point arithmetic and activation functions for universal approximation of quantized networks. Then, we show that various popular activation functions satisfy our sufficient condition, e.g., Sigmoid, ReLU, ELU, SoftPlus, SiLU, Mish, and GELU. In other words, networks using those activation functions are capable of universal approximation. We further show that our necessary condition and sufficient condition coincide under a mild condition on activation functions: e.g., for an activation function $\sigma$, there exists a fixed-point number $x$ such that $\sigma(x)=0$. Namely, we find a necessary and sufficient condition for a large class of activation functions. We lastly show that even quantized networks using binary weights in ${-1,1}$ can also universally approximate for practical activation functions.