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Neural network width and depth are fundamental aspects of network topology. Universal approximation theorems provide that with increasing width or depth, there exists a neural network that approximates a function arbitrarily well. These…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-31 Ibrohim Nosirov , Jeffrey M. Hokanson

In this article, we prove approximation theorems in classes of deep and shallow neural networks with analytic activation functions by elementary arguments. We prove for both real and complex networks with non-polynomial activation that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-28 Josiah Park , Stephan Wojtowytsch

In 2017, Hanin and Sellke showed that the class of arbitrarily deep, real-valued, feed-forward and ReLU-activated networks of width w forms a dense subset of the space of continuous functions on R^n, with respect to the topology of uniform…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Joris Dommel , Sven A. Wegner

The Universal Approximation Theorem posits that neural networks can theoretically possess unlimited approximation capacity with a suitable activation function and a freely chosen or trained set of parameters. However, a more practical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-26 Li Liu , Tengchao Yu , Heng Yong

We study the approximation properties of neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODEs) in the space of continuous functions. Since a neural ODE requires input and output dimensions to be the same, while input and output dimensions of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-04-08 Arturo De Marinis , Davide Murari , Elena Celledoni , Nicola Guglielmi , Brynjulf Owren , Francesco Tudisco

In this paper, a universal approximation theorem (UAT) for shallow neural networks whose inputs belong to a topological vector space (TVS) and whose outputs take values in a Hausdorff locally convex TVS is established. The networks are…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2026-03-10 Sachin Saini

While it is widely known that neural networks are universal approximators of continuous functions, a less known and perhaps more powerful result is that a neural network with a single hidden layer can approximate accurately any nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-03 Lu Lu , Pengzhan Jin , George Em Karniadakis

The Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is one of the most prominent neural network architectures in deep learning. Despite its widespread adoption, our understanding of its universal approximation properties has been limited due to its…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Geonho Hwang , Myungjoo Kang

It is well-known that neural networks are universal approximators, but that deeper networks tend in practice to be more powerful than shallower ones. We shed light on this by proving that the total number of neurons $m$ required to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-30 David Rolnick , Max Tegmark

We define a neural network in infinite dimensional spaces for which we can show the universal approximation property. Indeed, we derive approximation results for continuous functions from a Fr\'echet space $\X$ into a Banach space $\Y$. The…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2022-05-18 Fred Espen Benth , Nils Detering , Luca Galimberti

Recently there has been much interest in understanding why deep neural networks are preferred to shallow networks. We show that, for a large class of piecewise smooth functions, the number of neurons needed by a shallow network to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Shiyu Liang , R. Srikant

We investigate the approximation capabilities of dense neural networks. While universal approximation theorems establish that sufficiently large architectures can approximate arbitrary continuous functions if there are no restrictions on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Levi Rauchwerger , Stefanie Jegelka , Ron Levie

We prove a universal approximation property (UAP) for a class of ODENet and a class of ResNet, which are simplified mathematical models for deep learning systems with skip connections. The UAP can be stated as follows. Let $n$ and $m$ be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Yuto Aizawa , Masato Kimura , Kazunori Matsui

While neural networks are used for classification tasks across domains, a long-standing open problem in machine learning is determining whether neural networks trained using standard procedures are optimal for classification, i.e., whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin , Caroline Uhler

This paper extends the universal approximation property of single-hidden-layer feedforward neural networks beyond compact domains, which is of particular interest for the approximation within weighted $C^k$-spaces and weighted Sobolev…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-08 Ariel Neufeld , Philipp Schmocker

We prove two universal approximation theorems for a range of dropout neural networks. These are feed-forward neural networks in which each edge is given a random $\{0,1\}$-valued filter, that have two modes of operation: in the first each…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Oxana A. Manita , Mark A. Peletier , Jacobus W. Portegies , Jaron Sanders , Albert Senen-Cerda

One of the reasons why many neural networks are capable of replicating complicated tasks or functions is their universal property. Though the past few decades have seen tremendous advances in theories of neural networks, a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Tan Bui-Thanh

Although neural networks traditionally are typically used to approximate functions defined over $\mathbb{R}^n$, the successes of graph neural networks, point-cloud neural networks, and manifold deep learning among other methods have…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-07-11 Stella Rose Biderman

We propose o1Neuro, a new neural network model built on sparse indicator activation neurons, with two key statistical properties. (1) Constructive universal approximation: At the population level, a deep o1Neuro can approximate any…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-15 Chien-Ming Chi

This article concerns the expressive power of depth in neural nets with ReLU activations and bounded width. We are particularly interested in the following questions: what is the minimal width $w_{\text{min}}(d)$ so that ReLU nets of width…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Boris Hanin