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We consider the problem of computing the best-fitting ReLU with respect to square-loss on a training set when the examples have been drawn according to a spherical Gaussian distribution (the labels can be arbitrary). Let $\mathsf{opt} < 1$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-06 Surbhi Goel , Sushrut Karmalkar , Adam Klivans

We propose and analyze a new family of algorithms for training neural networks with ReLU activations. Our algorithms are based on the technique of alternating minimization: estimating the activation patterns of each ReLU for all given…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-12 Gauri Jagatap , Chinmay Hegde

We propose a new formulation of the maximum score estimator that uses compositions of rectified linear unit (ReLU) functions, instead of indicator functions as in Manski (1975,1985), to encode the sign alignment restrictions. Since the ReLU…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-11-25 Xiaohong Chen , Wayne Yuan Gao , Likang Wen

The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is a foundational activation function in artficial neural networks. Recent literature frequently misattributes its origin to the 2018 (initial) version of this paper, which exclusively investigated ReLU at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Abien Fred Agarap

We study the problem of inverting a deep generative model with ReLU activations. Inversion corresponds to finding a latent code vector that explains observed measurements as much as possible. In most prior works this is performed by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-20 Qi Lei , Ajil Jalal , Inderjit S. Dhillon , Alexandros G. Dimakis

With the advancement of deep learning, reducing computational complexity and memory consumption has become a critical challenge, and ternary neural networks (NNs) that restrict parameters to $\{-1, 0, +1\}$ have attracted attention as a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Yuta Nakahara , Manabu Kobayashi , Toshiyasu Matsushima

Amongst others, the adoption of Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) is regarded as one of the ingredients of the success of deep learning. ReLU activation has been shown to mitigate the vanishing gradient issue, to encourage sparsity in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Nicola Picchiotti , Marco Gori

We study the learning ability of linear recurrent neural networks with Gradient Descent. We prove the first theoretical guarantee on linear RNNs to learn any stable linear dynamic system using any a large type of loss functions. For an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Lifu Wang , Tianyu Wang , Shengwei Yi , Bo Shen , Bo Hu , Xing Cao

One of the arguments to explain the success of deep learning is the powerful approximation capacity of deep neural networks. Such capacity is generally accompanied by the explosive growth of the number of parameters, which, in turn, leads…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-15 Zuowei Shen , Haizhao Yang , Shijun Zhang

We provide efficient replicable algorithms for the problem of learning large-margin halfspaces. Our results improve upon the algorithms provided by Impagliazzo, Lei, Pitassi, and Sorrell [STOC, 2022]. We design the first…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Alkis Kalavasis , Amin Karbasi , Kasper Green Larsen , Grigoris Velegkas , Felix Zhou

In this paper, we study the optimality gap between two-layer ReLU networks regularized with weight decay and their convex relaxations. We show that when the training data is random, the relative optimality gap between the original problem…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-15 Sungyoon Kim , Mert Pilanci

We prove several hardness results for training depth-2 neural networks with the ReLU activation function; these networks are simply weighted sums (that may include negative coefficients) of ReLUs. Our goal is to output a depth-2 neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-30 Surbhi Goel , Adam Klivans , Pasin Manurangsi , Daniel Reichman

We study non-convex empirical risk minimization for learning halfspaces and neural networks. For loss functions that are $L$-Lipschitz continuous, we present algorithms to learn halfspaces and multi-layer neural networks that achieve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-11-26 Yuchen Zhang , Jason D. Lee , Martin J. Wainwright , Michael I. Jordan

Recent work has shown that the training of a one-hidden-layer, scalar-output fully-connected ReLU neural network can be reformulated as a finite-dimensional convex program. Unfortunately, the scale of such a convex program grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-27 Yatong Bai , Tanmay Gautam , Yu Gai , Somayeh Sojoudi

We present polynomial time and sample efficient algorithms for learning an unknown depth-2 feedforward neural network with general ReLU activations, under mild non-degeneracy assumptions. In particular, we consider learning an unknown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-03 Pranjal Awasthi , Alex Tang , Aravindan Vijayaraghavan

Neural networks activated by the rectified linear unit (ReLU) play a central role in the recent development of deep learning. The topic of approximating functions from H\"older spaces by these networks is crucial for understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Tong Mao , Ding-Xuan Zhou

Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are very successful at solving challenging problems with sequential data. However, this observed efficiency is not yet entirely explained by theory. It is known that a certain class of multiplicative RNNs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-31 Valentin Khrulkov , Oleksii Hrinchuk , Ivan Oseledets

Rectified linear activation units are important components for state-of-the-art deep convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a novel S-shaped rectified linear activation unit (SReLU) to learn both convex and non-convex functions,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-12-23 Xiaojie Jin , Chunyan Xu , Jiashi Feng , Yunchao Wei , Junjun Xiong , Shuicheng Yan

Neural networks are a powerful class of functions that can be trained with simple gradient descent to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a variety of applications. Despite their practical success, there is a paucity of results that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-06 Bo Xie , Yingyu Liang , Le Song

This paper introduces the first globally optimal algorithm for the empirical risk minimization problem of two-layer maxout and ReLU networks, i.e., minimizing the number of misclassifications. The algorithm has a worst-case time complexity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xi He , Yi Miao , Max A. Little