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A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a widely used deep-learning network for dealing with sequential data. Imitating a dynamical system, an infinite-width RNN can approximate any open dynamical system in a compact domain. In general, deep…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-30 Chang hoon Song , Geonho Hwang , Jun ho Lee , Myungjoo Kang

Polynomial functions have plenty of useful analytical properties, but they are rarely used as learning models because their function class is considered to be restricted. This work shows that when trained properly polynomial functions can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-30 Li-Ping Liu , Ruiyuan Gu , Xiaozhe Hu

The exact minimum width that allows for universal approximation of unbounded-depth networks is known only for ReLU and its variants. In this work, we study the minimum width of networks using general activation functions. Specifically, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Jonghyun Shin , Namjun Kim , Geonho Hwang , Sejun Park

We present a simple proof for the benefit of depth in multi-layer feedforward network with rectified activation ("depth separation"). Specifically we present a sequence of classification problems indexed by $m$ such that (a) for any fixed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Asaf Amrami , Yoav Goldberg

In this paper, we investigate the expressivity and approximation properties of deep neural networks employing the ReLU$^k$ activation function for $k \geq 2$. Although deep ReLU networks can approximate polynomials effectively, deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Juncai He , Tong Mao , Jinchao Xu

In the desire to quantify the success of neural networks in deep learning and other applications, there is a great interest in understanding which functions are efficiently approximated by the outputs of neural networks. By now, there…

We consider approximations of general continuous functions on finite-dimensional cubes by general deep ReLU neural networks and study the approximation rates with respect to the modulus of continuity of the function and the total number of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Dmitry Yarotsky

\citet{farrell2021deep} establish non-asymptotic high-probability bounds for general deep feedforward neural network (with rectified linear unit activation function) estimators, with \citet[Theorem 1]{farrell2021deep} achieving a suboptimal…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-11 Zhaoji Tang

We study the approximation of the median of $d$ inputs using ReLU neural networks. We present depth-width tradeoffs under several settings, culminating in a constant-depth, linear-width construction that achieves exponentially small…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Abhigyan Dutta , Itay Safran , Paul Valiant

We prove some new results concerning the approximation rate of neural networks with general activation functions. Our first result concerns the rate of approximation of a two layer neural network with a polynomially-decaying non-sigmoidal…

Classical Analysis and ODEs · Mathematics 2021-01-05 Jonathan W. Siegel , Jinchao Xu

We study the problem of approximating compactly-supported integrable functions while implementing their support set using feedforward neural networks. Our first main result transcribes this "structured" approximation problem into a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Anastasis Kratsios , Behnoosh Zamanlooy

Recently, the authors of \cite{SYZ22} developed a neural network with width $36d(2d + 1)$ and depth $11$, which utilizes a special activation function called the elementary universal activation function, to achieve the super approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Ayan Maiti , Michelle Michelle , Haizhao Yang

The standard Universal Approximation Theorem for operator neural networks (NNs) holds for arbitrary width and bounded depth. Here, we prove that operator NNs of bounded width and arbitrary depth are universal approximators for continuous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-24 Annan Yu , Chloé Becquey , Diana Halikias , Matthew Esmaili Mallory , Alex Townsend

An approach to construct explicit integral representations for two-layer ReLU networks is presented, which provides relatively simple representations for any multivariate polynomial. Quantitative bounds are provided for a particular,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-13 Anthony Lee

We make the case for neural network objects and extend an already existing neural network calculus explained in detail in Chapter 2 on \cite{bigbook}. Our aim will be to show that, yes, indeed, it makes sense to talk about neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-05 Shakil Rafi , Joshua Lee Padgett , Ukash Nakarmi

Depth is widely viewed as a central contributor to the success of deep neural networks, whereas standard neural network approximation theory typically provides guarantees only for the final output and leaves the role of intermediate layers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Shijun Zhang , Zuowei Shen , Yuesheng Xu

A new non-linear variant of a quantitative extension of the uniform boundedness principle is used to show sharpness of error bounds for univariate approximation by sums of sigmoid and ReLU functions. Single hidden layer feedforward neural…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2020-06-18 Steffen Goebbels

Recent work has shown that purely quadratic functions can replace MLPs in transformers with no significant loss in performance, while enabling new methods of interpretability based on linear algebra. In this work, we theoretically derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Nora Belrose , Alice Rigg

In a function approximation with a neural network, an input dataset is mapped to an output index by optimizing the parameters of each hidden-layer unit. For a unary function, we present constraints on the parameters and its second…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-06-22 Masayo Inoue , Mana Futamura , Hirokazu Ninomiya

We derive an approximation error bound that holds simultaneously for a function and all its derivatives up to any prescribed order. The bounds apply to elementary functions, including multivariate polynomials, the exponential function, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Konstantin Yakovlev , Nikita Puchkin