English

Fully tensorial approach to hypercomplex-valued neural networks

Machine Learning 2026-01-27 v5 Artificial Intelligence Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

A fully tensorial theoretical framework for hypercomplex-valued neural networks is presented. The proposed approach enables neural network architectures to operate on data defined over arbitrary finite-dimensional algebras. The central observation is that algebra multiplication can be represented by a rank-three tensor, which allows all algebraic operations in neural network layers to be formulated in terms of standard tensor contractions, permutations, and reshaping operations. This tensor-based formulation provides a unified and dimension-independent description of hypercomplex-valued dense and convolutional layers and is directly compatible with modern deep learning libraries supporting optimized tensor operations. The proposed framework recovers existing constructions for four-dimensional algebras as a special case. Within this setting, a tensor-based version of the universal approximation theorem for single-layer hypercomplex-valued perceptrons is established under mild non-degeneracy assumptions on the underlying algebra, thereby providing a rigorous theoretical foundation for the considered class of neural networks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2407.00449,
  title  = {Fully tensorial approach to hypercomplex-valued neural networks},
  author = {Agnieszka Niemczynowicz and Radosław Antoni Kycia},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.00449},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

23 pages, 3 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T17:23:39.208Z