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In the past decade, deep learning became the prevalent methodology for predictive modeling thanks to the remarkable accuracy of deep neural networks in tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Meanwhile, the structure…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Joey Huchette , Gonzalo Muñoz , Thiago Serra , Calvin Tsay

In this paper we investigate the performance of different types of rectified activation functions in convolutional neural network: standard rectified linear unit (ReLU), leaky rectified linear unit (Leaky ReLU), parametric rectified linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-30 Bing Xu , Naiyan Wang , Tianqi Chen , Mu Li

We consider functions from the real numbers to the real numbers, output by a neural network with 1 hidden activation layer, arbitrary width, and ReLU activation function. We assume that the parameters of the neural network are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 David Holmes

The strong lottery ticket hypothesis has highlighted the potential for training deep neural networks by pruning, which has inspired interesting practical and theoretical insights into how neural networks can represent functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-10 Rebekka Burkholz

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

We investigate the implications of removing bias in ReLU networks regarding their expressivity and learning dynamics. We first show that two-layer bias-free ReLU networks have limited expressivity: the only odd function two-layer bias-free…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Yedi Zhang , Andrew Saxe , Peter E. Latham

The choice of activation function can have a large effect on the performance of a neural network. While there have been some attempts to hand-engineer novel activation functions, the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Garrett Bingham , William Macke , Risto Miikkulainen

Deep networks are gradually penetrating almost every domain in our lives due to their amazing success. However, with substantive performance accuracy improvements comes the price of \emph{irreproducibility}. Two identical models, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Gil I. Shamir , Dong Lin , Lorenzo Coviello

We develop a corrective mechanism for neural network approximation: the total available non-linear units are divided into multiple groups and the first group approximates the function under consideration, the second group approximates the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Guy Bresler , Dheeraj Nagaraj

We study the theory of neural network (NN) from the lens of classical nonparametric regression problems with a focus on NN's ability to adaptively estimate functions with heterogeneous smoothness -- a property of functions in Besov or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Kaiqi Zhang , Yu-Xiang Wang

Neural networks with ReLU activation function have been shown to be universal function approximators and learn function mapping as non-smooth functions. Recently, there is considerable interest in the use of neural networks in applications…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-06 Parameswaran Sankaranarayanan , Raghunathan Rengaswamy

The choice of activation function fundamentally shapes the representational capacity and parameter efficiency of deep neural networks, yet most widely used activations lack rigorous theoretical guarantees on these properties. We provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ibrahim Albool , Malak Gamal El-Din , Salma Elmalaki , Yasser Shoukry

Deep neural networks have emerged as powerful tools for learning operators defined over infinite-dimensional function spaces. However, existing theories frequently encounter difficulties related to dimensionality and limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jianfei Li , Shuo Huang , Han Feng , Ding-Xuan Zhou , Gitta Kutyniok

Learning approximations to smooth target functions of many variables from finite sets of pointwise samples is an important task in scientific computing and its many applications in computational science and engineering. Despite well over…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2024-04-08 Ben Adcock , Simone Brugiapaglia , Nick Dexter , Sebastian Moraga

Lipschitz-constrained neural networks have many applications in machine learning. Since designing and training expressive Lipschitz-constrained networks is very challenging, there is a need for improved methods and a better theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sebastian Neumayer , Alexis Goujon , Pakshal Bohra , Michael Unser

In this work, we consider the approximation of a large class of bounded functions, with minimal regularity assumptions, by ReLU neural networks. We show that the approximation error can be bounded from above by a quantity proportional to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-27 Owen Davis , Gianluca Geraci , Mohammad Motamed

Deep learning is recognized to be capable of discovering deep features for representation learning and pattern recognition without requiring elegant feature engineering techniques by taking advantage of human ingenuity and prior knowledge.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Zhi Han , Siquan Yu , Shao-Bo Lin , Ding-Xuan Zhou

We study the realization map of deep ReLU networks, focusing on when a function determines its parameters up to scaling and permutation. To analyze hidden redundancies beyond these standard symmetries, we introduce a framework based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Moritz Grillo , Guido Montúfar

We provide a theoretical explanation of the role of the number of nodes at each layer in deep neural networks. We prove that the largest variation of a deep neural network with ReLU activation function arises when the layer with the fewest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-11 Yongdai Kim , Dongha Kim

We are interested in assessing the use of neural networks as surrogate models to approximate and minimize objective functions in optimization problems. While neural networks are widely used for machine learning tasks such as classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Tommaso Giovannelli , Oumaima Sohab , Luis Nunes Vicente