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Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuhao Liu , Zilin Wang , Lei Wu , Shaobo Zhang

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 study two models of ReLU neural networks: monotone networks (ReLU$^+$) and input convex neural networks (ICNN). Our focus is on expressivity, mostly in terms of depth, and we prove the following lower bounds. For the maximum function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Egor Bakaev , Florestan Brunck , Christoph Hertrich , Daniel Reichman , Amir Yehudayoff

Modern neural networks are often quite wide, causing large memory and computation costs. It is thus of great interest to train a narrower network. However, training narrow neural nets remains a challenging task. We ask two theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-24 Jiawei Zhang , Yushun Zhang , Mingyi Hong , Ruoyu Sun , Zhi-Quan Luo

This paper presents a novel framework for understanding trained ReLU networks as random, affine functions, where the randomness is induced by the distribution over the inputs. By characterizing the probability distribution of the network's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Shreyas Chaudhari , José M. F. Moura

A new network with super approximation power is introduced. This network is built with Floor ($\lfloor x\rfloor$) or ReLU ($\max\{0,x\}$) activation function in each neuron and hence we call such networks Floor-ReLU networks. For any…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-30 Zuowei Shen , Haizhao Yang , Shijun Zhang

Expressive efficiency refers to the relation between two architectures A and B, whereby any function realized by B could be replicated by A, but there exists functions realized by A, which cannot be replicated by B unless its size grows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-27 Or Sharir , Amnon Shashua

We show that for neural network functions that have width less or equal to the input dimension all connected components of decision regions are unbounded. The result holds for continuous and strictly monotonic activation functions as well…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-04 Hans-Peter Beise , Steve Dias Da Cruz , Udo Schröder

The activation function deployed in a deep neural network has great influence on the performance of the network at initialisation, which in turn has implications for training. In this paper we study how to avoid two problems at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Michael Murray , Vinayak Abrol , Jared Tanner

Neural networks with rectified linear unit activations are essentially multivariate linear splines. As such, one of many ways to measure the "complexity" or "expressivity" of a neural network is to count the number of knots in the spline…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-12-01 Kevin K. Chen

It has been widely assumed that a neural network cannot be recovered from its outputs, as the network depends on its parameters in a highly nonlinear way. Here, we prove that in fact it is often possible to identify the architecture,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-25 David Rolnick , Konrad P. Kording

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

Over-parameterized neural networks generalize well in practice without any explicit regularization. Although it has not been proven yet, empirical evidence suggests that implicit regularization plays a crucial role in deep learning and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-07 Masayoshi Kubo , Ryotaro Banno , Hidetaka Manabe , Masataka Minoji

In the recent literature the important role of depth in deep learning has been emphasized. In this paper we argue that sufficient width of a feedforward network is equally important by answering the simple question under which conditions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-11 Quynh Nguyen , Mahesh Chandra Mukkamala , Matthias Hein

Activation functions shape the outputs of artificial neurons and, therefore, are integral parts of neural networks in general and deep learning in particular. Some activation functions, such as logistic and relu, have been used for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Johannes Lederer

Activation functions in neural networks are typically selected from a set of empirically validated, commonly used static functions such as ReLU, tanh, or sigmoid. However, by optimizing the shapes of a network's activation functions, we can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 William H Patty

In this article we identify a general class of high-dimensional continuous functions that can be approximated by deep neural networks (DNNs) with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation without the curse of dimensionality. In other…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Adrian Riekert

We introduce a variational framework to learn the activation functions of deep neural networks. Our aim is to increase the capacity of the network while controlling an upper-bound of the actual Lipschitz constant of the input-output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Shayan Aziznejad , Harshit Gupta , Joaquim Campos , Michael Unser

A simple approach is proposed to obtain complexity controls for neural networks with general activation functions. The approach is motivated by approximating the general activation functions with one-dimensional ReLU networks, which reduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Zhong Li , Chao Ma , Lei Wu

A key challenge facing deep learning is that neural networks are often not robust to shifts in the underlying data distribution. We study this problem from the perspective of the statistical concept of parameter identification.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-18 Kan Xu , Hamsa Bastani , Osbert Bastani