A persistent empirical observation is that trained neural networks outperform their neural tangent kernel (NTK) limit on tasks with compositional structure, yet a quantitative account of $\textbf{when}$ and $\textbf{by how much}$ has been lacking. Working on the unit circle, we give such an account through a dichotomy between two complexity measures of the target: its $\textbf{Fourier complexity}$, which controls NTK kernel regression, and its $\textbf{architectural complexity}$, which controls learning over depth-$L$, width-$w$ ReLU networks with the variation norm of the weights bounded by $R$.
arXiv:2608.23877v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: We prove a depth hierarchy for ReLU neural networks in which every additional ReLU layer can save exponentially many neurons. For every $\ell\geq 3$, a...
By Itay Safran
arXiv:2510. 04060v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish two related but logically distinct results for shallow ReLU$^k$ neural networks on the unit sphere $\SS^d$.
By Tong Mao, Jinchao Xu
arXiv:2607. 10589v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In contrast to most studies on neural network approximation theory that characterize results through a single parameter, such as the total number of network parameters, \cite{shen2020deep} pioneered the characterization of approximation rates as a joint function of the width parameter $N$ and the depth parameter $L$, thereby granting greater architectural flexibility.
By Yanming Lai, Defeng Sun, Yang Wang
arXiv:2609. 25710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The statistical accuracy of neural networks depends on both their approximation power and the complexity of the class fitted from data.
By Baicheng Li, Zuowei Shen, Haizhao Yang, Shijun Zhang
arXiv:2609. 03129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several classical machine-learning methods, such as KRRs and SVRs, are both computationally and analytically tractable since their estimators either admit closed-form expressions or are obtained by minimizing convex training objectives; neither feature is generally available for deep neural networks.
By Ruiyang Hong, Hrad Ghoukasian, Anastasis Kratsios
An input may activate few hidden units even when different inputs collectively use an entire network. We study the statistical complexity of this input-dependent sparsity in the one-hidden-layer ReLU model of Awasthi et al.
arXiv:2004. 05813v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose that we are given independent, identically distributed random samples $x_1,\cdots,x_n$ from a mixture at most $k$ many $d$-dimensional spherical Gaussian distributions $\mu_1,\cdots,\mu_{k_0}$ of identical and known variance $\sigma^2$ in each coordinate, such that the minimum $\ell^2$ distance between two distinct centers $y_l$ and $y_j$ is greater than $2\Delta\sigma \min\{\sqrt{d},\sqrt k\}$, where $\Delta>C_0$, and $C_0$ is a sufficiently large universal constant.
By Somnath Chakraborty, Hariharan Narayanan
arXiv:2609.09130v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An input may activate few hidden units even when different inputs collectively use an entire network. We study the statistical complexity of this input...
By Xiaoyu Li, Zhizhou Sha, Jiaojiao Jiang, Junbin Gao, Andi Han
The paper proves that several decision and approximation problems for ReLU neural networks are computationally hard. For any number of layers λ≥2, deciding whether a network’s output is positive (and thus whether it is surjective) is W[ℓ−1]-hard when parameterized by the input dimension d. In particular, for two-layer networks, the related geometric problem of zonotope non‑containment is W[1]-hard in the ambient dimension, and computing or approximating the Lp‑Lipschitz constant is NP‑hard and W[ℓ−1]-hard with respect to d. The results also show that these problems remain hard when parameterized by the number of layers for constant d, implying that naive enumeration algorithms running in n^{(ℓ−1)d}·poly(N) time are essentially optimal under the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
By Vincent Froese, Moritz Grillo, Christoph Hertrich, Moritz Stargalla
arXiv:2607. 16676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How deep does a graph neural network need to be on a sparse graph?
By Aseem Raj Baranwal
arXiv:2608. 17434v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Gaussian regression over the explicit vector-valued Parhi--Nowak deep-RBV^2 architecture with depth L, width w, layer-sum variation budget A, and output bound B.
By Tao Jiang, Minbo Gao, Shaowei Cai