On the Existence of Optimal Shallow Feedforward Networks with ReLU Activation

Year:    2024

Author:    Steffen Dereich, Sebastian Kassing

Journal of Machine Learning, Vol. 3 (2024), Iss. 1 : pp. 1–22

Abstract

We prove existence of global minima in the loss landscape for the approximation of continuous target functions using shallow feedforward artificial neural networks with ReLU activation. This property is one of the fundamental artifacts separating ReLU from other commonly used activation functions. We propose a kind of closure of the search space so that in the extended space minimizers exist. In a second step, we show under mild assumptions that the newly added functions in the extension perform worse than appropriate representable ReLU networks. This then implies that the optimal response in the extended target space is indeed the response of a ReLU network.

Journal Article Details

Publisher Name:    Global Science Press

Language:    English

DOI:    https://doi.org/10.4208/jml.230903

Journal of Machine Learning, Vol. 3 (2024), Iss. 1 : pp. 1–22

Published online:    2024-01

AMS Subject Headings:   

Copyright:    COPYRIGHT: © Global Science Press

Pages:    22

Keywords:    Neural Networks Shallow Networks Best Approximation ReLU Activation Approximatively Compact.

Author Details

Steffen Dereich

Sebastian Kassing