# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged universal-approximation-theorems

19

There are multiple papers on the topic because there have been multiple attempts to prove that neural networks are universal (i.e. they can approximate any continuous function) from slightly different perspectives and using slightly different assumptions (e.g. assuming that certain activation functions are used). Note that these proofs tell you that neural ...

7

There is stuff like the Universal Approximation Theorem. There are also investigations into the loss surface of neural networks. And classics like this explanation of the vanishing gradient problem. But I'm afraid the mathematical theory of neural networks only exists in bits and pieces in many different papers. And many of the most important questions ...

6

Before anything, the function you have wrote for the network lacks the bias variables (I'm sure you used bias to get those beautiful images, otherwise your tanh network had to start from zero). Generally I would say it's impossible to have a good approximation of sinus with just 3 neurons, but if you want to consider one period of sinus, then you can do ...

5

"Modern" Guarantees for Feed-Forward Neural Networks My answer will complement nbro's above, which gave a very nice overview of universal approximation theorems for different types of commonly used architectures, by focusing on recent developments specifically for feed-forward networks. I'll try an emphasis depth over breadth (sometimes called ...

3

Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) can theoretically approximate any bounded, continuous function. There's no guarantee for a discontinuous function. There are plenty of important discontinuous functions, like, say, the prime counting function. The prime counting function $\pi(n)$ is simply equal to the number of primes less than or equal to $n$. It has a ...

2

To check if a function is linear is easy: if you can train one fully connected layer, without activations, of the right dimensions (for a function $\mathbb{R}^n \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^m$ you need $nm$ weights aka the matrix corresponding to the linear application), with enough data, to 100% accuracy... then it is linear. The estimated function is explicit: ...

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Support vector machines In the paper A Note on the Universal Approximation Capability of Support Vector Machines (2002) B. Hammer and K. Gersmann investigate the universal function approximation capabilities of SVMs. More specifically, the authors show that SVMs with standard kernels (including Gaussian, polynomial, and several dot product kernels) can ...

2

While I'm not familiar with any explicit statements regarding what a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) cannot learn, I can provide some further detail on the positive statements you made about MLP capabilities: A MLP with a single hidden layer is capable of what is commonly termed 'Universal Function Approximation', i.e. it can approximate any bounded continuous ...

2

A function is simply a procedure that maps a particular input to a particular output. You put in $X$, and the function computes $Y$. Those $X$ and $Y$ can take many different forms. It could be mapping one number to another number (convert miles to kilometres), mapping sound to text (name that tune), mapping text to text (translate languages), mapping a ...

2

This is akin to asking "Why do we need more than one instance of sine to represent any repeating function" or "why can't we represent any polynomial with an equivalent polynomial of just the first degree?" There are many, many problems... I'd even want to say most... that will require more than one layer to solve because the higher ...

1

The classical version of the universal approximation theorem states that, roughly, given a continuous function $f \colon [0, 1]^n \to [0, 1]^n$, there exists a single layer neural network and a set of weights and biases such that this network approximates the given function $f$ arbitrarily well. It doesn't say anything about how you obtain such weights: the ...

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The more I think about it the more convinced I am that the visual explanation from the linked lecture is wrong. But the good news is there are still some ways to get close to the cylinder but not before the activation of the last neuron but instead afterwards. I haven't done it with simgoid. But I tried with ReLu instead for now. We can cut the tower at the ...

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I think the author refers to both different choices of activation function and loss. It is explained in more detail in chapter 2. In particular 2.3 is ilustrative of this point. I don't think there is a relation between this argument and universal approximation theorems, which state that certain classes of neural networks can approximate any function in ...

1

I think your deduction is mostly correct. Neural networks of depth are universal function approximators. This means that in principal, for any function of the form you describe, there's a NN that approximates it. However, a particular NN architecture of fixed width and depth, with fixed connections is not a universal approximator for all functions. Only ...

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The branch of AI research that answers questions like this is called computational learning theory. For the specific question you have asked, the universal approximation theorem does indeed prove that any function can be modeled by a sufficiently wide neural network. The definition of a function includes the requirement that each input be mapped to exactly ...

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The network is the function. A network is a function, that is modeled by terms describing the architecture and coefficients that are learned. Look at a simple model: $$f(x) = ax+b$$ Your solver determines $a$ and $b$, and you substitute them into $f(x)$ and then you're able to calculate $f(42)$. The function is linear by definition, but may not be a good ...

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