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In this work, beyond width and depth, we augment a neural network with a new dimension called height by intra-linking neurons in the same layer to create an intra-layer hierarchy, which gives rise to the notion of height. We call a neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Feng-Lei Fan , Ze-Yu Li , Huan Xiong , Tieyong Zeng

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

Covering numbers of (deep) ReLU networks have been used to characterize approximation-theoretic performance, to upper-bound prediction error in nonparametric regression, and to quantify classification capacity. These results rely on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-04 Weigutian Ou , Helmut Bölcskei

This paper considers the following question: how well can depth-two ReLU networks with randomly initialized bottom-level weights represent smooth functions? We give near-matching upper- and lower-bounds for $L_2$-approximation in terms of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-09 Daniel Hsu , Clayton Sanford , Rocco A. Servedio , Emmanouil-Vasileios Vlatakis-Gkaragkounis

The approximate degree of a Boolean function $f(x_{1},x_{2},\ldots,x_{n})$ is the minimum degree of a real polynomial that approximates $f$ pointwise within $1/3$. Upper bounds on approximate degree have a variety of applications in…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-01-16 Alexander A. Sherstov

A key challenge in scientific machine learning is solving partial differential equations (PDEs) on complex domains, where the curved geometry complicates the approximation of functions and their derivatives required by differential…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-09-26 Hanfei Zhou , Lei Shi

We discuss the expressive power of neural networks which use the non-smooth ReLU activation function $\varrho(x) = \max\{0,x\}$ by analyzing the approximation theoretic properties of such networks. The existing results mainly fall into two…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2019-04-10 Felix Voigtlaender , Philipp Petersen

In this paper, we investigate the expressivity and approximation properties of deep neural networks employing the ReLU$^k$ activation function for $k \geq 2$. Although deep ReLU networks can approximate polynomials effectively, deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-12 Juncai He , Tong Mao , Jinchao Xu

This paper studies the problem of how efficiently functions in the Sobolev spaces $\mathcal{W}^{s,q}([0,1]^d)$ and Besov spaces $\mathcal{B}^s_{q,r}([0,1]^d)$ can be approximated by deep ReLU neural networks with width $W$ and depth $L$,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-07-21 Yunfei Yang

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

Whereas recovery of the manifold from data is a well-studied topic, approximation rates for functions defined on manifolds are less known. In this work, we study a regression problem with inputs on a $d^*$-dimensional manifold that is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-05 Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

This paper focuses on over-parameterized deep neural networks (DNNs) with ReLU activation functions and proves that when the data distribution is well-separated, DNNs can achieve Bayes-optimal test error for classification while obtaining…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-01 Zhenyu Zhu , Fanghui Liu , Grigorios G Chrysos , Francesco Locatello , Volkan Cevher

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

We show that deep networks are better than shallow networks at approximating functions that can be expressed as a composition of functions described by a directed acyclic graph, because the deep networks can be designed to have the same…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-26 H. N. Mhaskar , T. Poggio

Modern deep learning models with great expressive power can be trained to overfit the training data but still generalize well. This phenomenon is referred to as \textit{benign overfitting}. Recently, a few studies have attempted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Yiwen Kou , Zixiang Chen , Yuanzhou Chen , Quanquan Gu

We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

While deep learning is successful in a number of applications, it is not yet well understood theoretically. A satisfactory theoretical characterization of deep learning however, is beginning to emerge. It covers the following questions: 1)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Tomaso Poggio , Andrzej Banburski , Qianli Liao

We show that there is a simple (approximately radial) function on $\reals^d$, expressible by a small 3-layer feedforward neural networks, which cannot be approximated by any 2-layer network, to more than a certain constant accuracy, unless…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-10 Ronen Eldan , Ohad Shamir

Let $\Omega = [0,1]^d$ be the unit cube in $\mathbb{R}^d$. We study the problem of how efficiently, in terms of the number of parameters, deep neural networks with the ReLU activation function can approximate functions in the Sobolev spaces…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-04-09 Jonathan W. Siegel

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