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Related papers: Universal Approximation of Functions on Sets

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The strength of machine learning models stems from their ability to learn complex function approximations from data; however, this strength also makes training deep neural networks challenging. Notably, the complex models tend to memorize…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-04-17 Mofassir ul Islam Arif , Mohsan Jameel , Josif Grabocka , Lars Schmidt-Thieme

Despite their widespread success, the application of deep neural networks to functional data remains scarce today. The infinite dimensionality of functional data means standard learning algorithms can be applied only after appropriate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Junwen Yao , Jonas Mueller , Jane-Ling Wang

The universal approximation theorem asserts that a single hidden layer neural network approximates continuous functions with any desired precision on compact sets. As an existential result, the universal approximation theorem supports the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-15 Wington L. Vital , Guilherme Vieira , Marcos Eduardo Valle

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 propose learning flexible but interpretable functions that aggregate a variable-length set of permutation-invariant feature vectors to predict a label. We use a deep lattice network model so we can architect the model structure to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-04 Andrew Cotter , Maya Gupta , Heinrich Jiang , James Muller , Taman Narayan , Serena Wang , Tao Zhu

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

Permutation invariant neural networks are a promising tool for making predictions from sets. However, we show that existing permutation invariant architectures, Deep Sets and Set Transformer, can suffer from vanishing or exploding gradients…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-15 Lily H. Zhang , Veronica Tozzo , John M. Higgins , Rajesh Ranganath

Large language models are capable of in-context learning, the ability to perform new tasks at test time using a handful of input-output examples, without parameter updates. We develop a universal approximation theory to elucidate how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Gen Li , Yuchen Jiao , Yu Huang , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen

Despite exceptional predictive performance of Deep sequence models (DSMs), the main concern of their deployment centers around the lack of uncertainty awareness. In contrast, probabilistic models quantify the uncertainty associated with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Wenlong Chen

Deep learning architectures are highly diverse. To prove their universal approximation properties, existing works typically rely on model-specific proofs. Generally, they construct a dedicated mathematical formulation for each architecture…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Wei Wang

A common setting for scientific inference is the ability to sample from a high-fidelity forward model (simulation) without having an explicit probability density of the data. We propose a simulation-based maximum likelihood deconvolution…

One of the theoretical pillars that sustain certain machine learning models are universal approximation theorems, which prove that they can approximate all functions from a function class to arbitrary precision. Independently, classical…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-04-28 Tobias Reinhart , Gemma De les Coves

Many real-world problems, e.g. object detection, have outputs that are naturally expressed as sets of entities. This creates a challenge for traditional deep neural networks which naturally deal with structured outputs such as vectors,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-10-03 S. Hamid Rezatofighi , Roman Kaskman , Farbod T. Motlagh , Qinfeng Shi , Daniel Cremers , Laura Leal-Taixé , Ian Reid

A central problem in machine learning is often formulated as follows: Given a dataset $\{(x_j, y_j)\}_{j=1}^M$, which is a sample drawn from an unknown probability distribution, the goal is to construct a functional model $f$ such that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Hrushikesh N. Mhaskar , Efstratios Tsoukanis , Ameya D. Jagtap

By universal formulas we understand parameterized analytic expressions that have a fixed complexity, but nevertheless can approximate any continuous function on a compact set. There exist various examples of such formulas, including some in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Dmitry Yarotsky

Domain generalization aims at training machine learning models to perform robustly across different and unseen domains. Several recent methods use multiple datasets to train models to extract domain-invariant features, hoping to generalize…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Mattia Segu , Alessio Tonioni , Federico Tombari

Experimental evidence indicates that simple models outperform complex deep networks on many unsupervised similarity tasks. We provide a simple yet rigorous explanation for this behaviour by introducing the concept of an optimal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-05-10 Vitalii Zhelezniak , Dan Busbridge , April Shen , Samuel L. Smith , Nils Y. Hammerla

In this chapter we take a look at the universal approximation question for stochastic feedforward neural networks. In contrast to deterministic networks, which represent mappings from a set of inputs to a set of outputs, stochastic networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-23 Thomas Merkh , Guido Montúfar

Equivariant neural networks provide a principled framework for incorporating symmetry into learning architectures and have been extensively analyzed through the lens of their separation power, that is, the ability to distinguish inputs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Marco Pacini , Gabriele Santin , Bruno Lepri , Shubhendu Trivedi

Objective functions that optimize deep neural networks play a vital role in creating an enhanced feature representation of the input data. Although cross-entropy-based loss formulations have been extensively used in a variety of supervised…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-12-19 Deen Dayal Mohan , Bhavin Jawade , Srirangaraj Setlur , Venu Govindaraj