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Along with the rapid development of deep learning in practice, the theoretical explanations for its success become urgent. Generalization and expressivity are two widely used measurements to quantify theoretical behaviors of deep learning.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-26 Shao-Bo Lin

Fully connected deep neural networks are successfully applied to classification and function approximation problems. By minimizing the cost function, i.e., finding the proper weights and biases, models can be built for accurate predictions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Qingguang Guan

In this article we present new results on neural networks with linear threshold activation functions. We precisely characterize the class of functions that are representable by such neural networks and show that 2 hidden layers are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Sammy Khalife , Hongyu Cheng , Amitabh Basu

Deep neural networks (DNNs) generate much richer function spaces than shallow networks. Since the function spaces induced by shallow networks have several approximation theoretic drawbacks, this explains, however, not necessarily the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-09-25 Konstantin Eckle , Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

This work focuses on the analysis of fully connected feed forward ReLU neural networks as they approximate a given, smooth function. In contrast to conventionally studied universal approximation properties under increasing architectures,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Erion Morina , Martin Holler

The synergy between spiking neural networks and neuromorphic hardware holds promise for the development of energy-efficient AI applications. Inspired by this potential, we revisit the foundational aspects to study the capabilities of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Manjot Singh , Adalbert Fono , Gitta Kutyniok

Researchers have proposed various activation functions. These activation functions help the deep network to learn non-linear behavior with a significant effect on training dynamics and task performance. The performance of these activations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Pravendra Singh , Munender Varshney , Vinay P. Namboodiri

The impressive expressive power of deep neural networks (DNNs) underlies their widespread applicability. However, while the theoretical capacity of deep architectures is high, the practical expressive power achieved through successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Zezhong Zhang , Feng Bao , Guannan Zhang

Determining the minimum width of fully connected neural networks has become a fundamental problem in recent theoretical studies of deep neural networks. In this paper, we study the lower bounds and upper bounds of the minimum width required…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Xiao-Song Yang , Qi Zhou , Xuan Zhou

A prevalent assumption regarding real-world data is that it lies on or close to a low-dimensional manifold. When deploying a neural network on data manifolds, the required size, i.e., the number of neurons of the network, heavily depends on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Jiachen Yao , Mayank Goswami , Chao Chen

In studying the expressiveness of neural networks, an important question is whether there are functions which can only be approximated by sufficiently deep networks, assuming their size is bounded. However, for constant depths, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-29 Gal Vardi , Ohad Shamir

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

Activation functions are non-linearities in neural networks that allow them to learn complex mapping between inputs and outputs. Typical choices for activation functions are ReLU, Tanh, Sigmoid etc., where the choice generally depends on…

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

Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Longqing Ye

Nonlinear activation functions are widely recognized for enhancing the expressivity of neural networks, which is the primary reason for their widespread implementation. In this work, we focus on ReLU activation and reveal a novel and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chaoyue Liu , Han Bi , Like Hui , Xiao Liu

The number of linear regions is one of the distinct properties of the neural networks using piecewise linear activation functions such as ReLU, comparing with those conventional ones using other activation functions. Previous studies showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Rui Zhu , Bo Lin , Haixu Tang

It has been noted in existing literature that over-parameterization in ReLU networks generally improves performance. While there could be several factors involved behind this, we prove some desirable theoretical properties at initialization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-03 Devansh Arpit , Yoshua Bengio

We study the expressivity of sparse maxout networks, where each neuron takes a fixed number of inputs from the previous layer and employs a, possibly multi-argument, maxout activation. This setting captures key characteristics of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Moritz Grillo , Tobias Hofmann

The weight initialization and the activation function of deep neural networks have a crucial impact on the performance of the training procedure. An inappropriate selection can lead to the loss of information of the input during forward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-09 Soufiane Hayou , Arnaud Doucet , Judith Rousseau