Other types of uniformity for circuits (incl. by small modifications)

Question

I've seen poly-time and logspace uniformity for circuit families, typically defined as the existence of a poly-time/logspace Turing machine "generator" that outputs the correctly sized circuit $C_n$ on input $n$. These restrictions upper bound the power of circuit families by requiring that they are computationally generated.

I was wondering what happens when you change the generator model. Here are two (vague) questions:

1. Are there other useful types of uniformity for circuit families?
2. Are there interesting "generators" besides time/space bounded TMs? For example, consider families that progress from $C_i$ to $C_{i+1}$ by "small" modifications of the circuit. Can these be broad and have interesting complexity properties?

The idea in #2 is far too inclusive, since it allows things like simple recursive definitions. I am more interested in severe restrictions on the range of possible families by limiting the types of modifications.

Answer 1

When you want to define (fully) uniform versions of circuit classes, log-space or poly-time uniformity is only sensible for classes of circuits whose power exceeds log-space or poly-time, respectively. This means that poly-time uniformity is next to useless, and log-space uniformity is good for classes like P, NC, $\mathrm{NC}^{k+1}$, $\mathrm{AC}^k$ for $k\ge1$, but not, say, for $\mathrm{NC}^1$.

The standard notion of uniformity for small complexity classes is DLOGTIME-uniformity, where furthermore one has to be careful what exact kind of description of the circuit is asked to be computable in DLOGTIME: in cases where it matters (e.g., $\mathrm{NC}^1$), one needs to use the extended connection language (cf. Ruzzo) of the circuit. This is known as $U_E$-uniformity.