Globally injective and bijective neural operators

Recently there has been great interest in operator learning, where networks learn operators between function spaces from an essentially infinite-dimensional perspective. In this work we present results for when the operators learned by these networks are injective and surjective. As a warmup, we combine prior work in both the finite-dimensional ReLU and operator learning setting by giving sharp conditions under which ReLU layers with linear neural operators are injective. We then consider the case the case when the activation function is pointwise bijective and obtain sufficient conditions for the layer to be injective. We remark that this question, while trivial in the finite-rank case, is subtler in the infinite-rank case and is proved using tools from Fredholm theory. Next, we prove that our supplied injective neural operators are universal approximators and that their implementation, with finite-rank neural networks, are still injective. This ensures that injectivity is not `lost' in the transcription from analytical operators to their finite-rank implementation with networks. Finally, we conclude with an increase in abstraction and consider general conditions when subnetworks, which may be many layers deep, are injective and surjective and provide an exact inversion from a `linearization.' This section uses general arguments from Fredholm theory and Leray-Schauder degree theory for non-linear integral equations to analyze the mapping properties of neural operators in function spaces. These results apply to subnetworks formed from the layers considered in this work, under natural conditions. We believe that our work has applications in Bayesian UQ where injectivity enables likelihood estimation and in inverse problems where surjectivity and injectivity corresponds to existence and uniqueness, respectively.