Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 36 (NeurIPS 2023) Main Conference Track
Vincent Froese, Christoph Hertrich
We study the parameterized complexity of training two-layer neural networks with respect to the dimension of the input data and the number of hidden neurons, considering ReLU and linear threshold activation functions. Albeit the computational complexity of these problems has been studied numerous times in recent years, several questions are still open. We answer questions by Arora et al. (ICLR 2018) and Khalife and Basu (IPCO 2022) showing that both problems are NP-hard for two dimensions, which excludes any polynomial-time algorithm for constant dimension. We also answer a question by Froese et al. (JAIR 2022) proving W[1]-hardness for four ReLUs (or two linear threshold neurons) with zero training error. Finally, in the ReLU case, we show fixed-parameter tractability for the combined parameter number of dimensions and number of ReLUs if the network is assumed to compute a convex map. Our results settle the complexity status regarding these parameters almost completely.