# How could you build a Neural Network with the same weights for different nodes in the same layer

The structure I'm imagining is like the one in the image bellow

where the output is softmax. For the hidden layer we would have

$$Z_1 = W_{11}^{[1]}x_2 + W_{12}^{[1]}x_2$$ $$Z_2 = W_{21}^{[1]}x_2 + W_{22}^{[1]}x_2$$ $$Z_3 = W_{11}^{[1]}x_3 + W_{12}^{[1]}x_4$$ $$Z_4 = W_{21}^{[1]}x_3 + W_{22}^{[1]}x_4$$

the same principle would apply to softmax. I came up with this idea by trying to create a neural network that behaved similar to a conditional logistic regression (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_logistic_regression).

I've done an implementation with Keras and Tensorflow that I believe will have the desired behavior, but I'm not sure.

class ConditionalNN(tf.keras.Model):
def __init__(self, out_dim, l1 = 0, l2 = 0):
super(ConditionalNN, self).__init__(name='')
self.layer1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(20,'tanh',kernel_regularizer=tf.keras.regularizers.l1_l2(l1=l1, l2=l2))
self.layerL1 = tf.keras.layers.Dense(1,'linear',kernel_regularizer=tf.keras.regularizers.l1_l2(l1=l1, l2=l2))
self.layerL2 = tf.keras.layers.Softmax(axis=-2)
def call(self, input_tensor, training=False):
x = self.layer1(input_tensor,training=training)
x = self.layerL1(x,training=training)
x = self.layerL2(x,training=training)
return x


In this case, the input would be a 3D tensor like:

X = [
[[x1,x2],
[x3,x4]],
...
]


and the output would be something like:

Y = [[1,0],
[0,1],
[1,0],
...
]


This is interesting idea and I think it makes sense to share weights. I have not seen exactly what you described, but it is common to share weights in cases that two inputs has similar meaning. For example, in this article they use shared embeddings for the target video and video from the user history that has the same video_id. It is definitely possible to implement it in TensorFlow, if the two inputs has the same dimensions. The way to implement it is straight forward, create a weights matrix with dimension of (feature_dimension, num_neuron) and multiply the different inputs with the same matrix.