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Deep, Skinny Neural Networks Are Not Universal Approximators (arxiv.org)
3 points by headalgorithm on Feb 5, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: By looking at the shapes of the regions a network carves space into, this study shows that very narrow networks have a hard limit on the functions they can represent. That limit stays the same no matter how many layers you add.

Abstract · Deep, Skinny Neural Networks are not Universal Approximators

In order to choose a neural network architecture that will be effective for a particular modeling problem, one must understand the limitations imposed by each of the potential options. These limitations are typically described in terms of information theoretic bounds, or by comparing the relative complexity needed to approximate example functions between different architectures. In this paper, we examine the topological constraints that the architecture of a neural network imposes on the level sets of all the functions that it is able to approximate. This approach is novel for both the nature of the limitations and the fact that they are independent of network depth for a broad family of activation functions.

Jesse Johnson
arXiv:1810.00393 · cs.LG, stat.ML · submitted Sep 30, 2018
abstract · pdf · html · 14 pages, 3 figures

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