Dynamical behaviors of multiple equilibria in competetive neural networks with discontinuous nonmonotonic piecewise linear activation functions

This paper addresses the problem of coexistence and dynamical behaviors of multiple equilibria for competitive neural networks. First, a general class of discontinuous nonmonotonic piecewise linear activation functions is introduced for competitive neural networks. Then based on the fixed point theorem and theory of strict diagnonal dominance matrix, it is shown that under some conditions, such n-neuron competitive neural networks can have 5ᶯ equilibria, among which 3ᶯ equilibria are locally stable and the others are unstable. More importantly, it is revealed that the neural networks with the discontinuous activation functions introduced in this paper can have both more total equilibria and locally stable equilibria than the ones with other activation functions, such as the continuous Mexican-hat-type activation function and discontinuous two-level activation function. Furthermore, the 3ᶯ locally stable equilibria given in this paper are located in not only saturated regions, but also unsaturated regions, which is different from the existing results on multistability of neural networks with multiple level activation functions. A simulation example is provided to illustrate and validate the theoretical findings.