Fuzzy finite-state automata can be deterministically encoded into recurrent neural networks

There has been an increased interest in combining fuzzy systems with neural networks because fuzzy neural systems merge the advantages of both paradigms. On the one hand, parameters in fuzzy systems have clear physical meanings and rule-based and linguistic information can be incorporated into adaptive fuzzy systems in a systematic way. On the other hand, there exist powerful algorithms for training various neural network models. However, most of the proposed combined architectures are only able to process static input-output relationships, i.e. they are not able to process temporal input sequences of arbitrary length. Fuzzy nite-state automata (FFAs) can model dynamical processes whose current state depends on the current input and previous states. Unlike in the case of deterministic nite-state automata (DFAs), FFAs are not in one particular state, rather each state is occupied to some degree deened by a membership function. Based on previous work on encoding DFAs in discrete-time, second-order recurrent neural networks, we propose an algorithm that constructs an augmented recurrent neural network that encodes a FFA and recognizes a given fuzzy regular language with arbitrary accuracy. We then empirically verify the encoding methodology by measuring string recognition performance of recurrent neural networks which encode large randomly generated FFAs. In particular, we examine how the networks' performance varies as a function of synaptic weight strength.