  We can compare the expressiveness of neural networks that use rectified
linear units (ReLUs) by the number of linear regions, which reflect the number
of pieces of the piecewise linear functions modeled by such networks. However,
enumerating these regions is prohibitive and the known analytical bounds are
identical for networks with same dimensions. In this work, we approximate the
number of linear regions through empirical bounds based on features of the
trained network and probabilistic inference. Our first contribution is a method
to sample the activation patterns defined by ReLUs using universal hash
functions. This method is based on a Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP)
formulation of the network and an algorithm for probabilistic lower bounds of
MILP solution sets that we call MIPBound, which is considerably faster than
exact counting and reaches values in similar orders of magnitude. Our second
contribution is a tighter activation-based bound for the maximum number of
linear regions, which is particularly stronger in networks with narrow layers.
Combined, these bounds yield a fast proxy for the number of linear regions of a
deep neural network.
