On Learning µ-Perceptron Networks with Binary Weights

Neural networks with binary weights are very important from both the theoretical and practical points of view. In this paper, we investigate the learnability of single binary perceptrons and unions of µ-binary-perceptron networks, i.e. an "OR" of binary perceptrons where each input unit is connected to one and only one perceptron. We give a polynomial time algorithm that PAC learns these networks under the uniform distribution. The algorithm is able to identify both the network connectivity and the weight values necessary to represent the target function. These results suggest that, under reasonable distributions, µ-perceptron networks may be easier to learn than fully connected networks.