Stability Analysis of Feedback Systems with ReLU Nonlinearities via Semialgebraic Set Representation

This paper is concerned with the stability/instability analysis problem of feedback systems with rectified linear unit (ReLU) nonlinearities. Such feedback systems arise when we model dynamical (recurrent) neural networks (NNs) and NN-driven control systems where all the activation functions of NNs are ReLUs. In this study, we focus on the semialgebraic set representation characterizing the input-output properties of ReLUs. This allows us to employ a novel copositive multiplier in the framework of the integral quadratic constraint and, thus, to derive a new linear matrix inequality (LMI) condition for the stability analysis of the feedback systems. However, the infeasibility of this LMI does not allow us to obtain any conclusion on the system's stability due to its conservativeness. This motivates us to consider its dual LMI. By investigating the structure of the dual solution, we derive a rank condition on the dual variable certificating that the system at hand is unstable. In addition, we construct a hierarchy of dual LMIs allowing for improved instability detection. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by several numerical examples.