Universal Approximation Power of Deep Residual Neural Networks via Nonlinear Control Theory

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Main Authors: Tabuada, Paulo, Gharesifard, Bahman
Format: Preprint
Published: 2020
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author Tabuada, Paulo
Gharesifard, Bahman
author_facet Tabuada, Paulo
Gharesifard, Bahman
contents In this paper, we explain the universal approximation capabilities of deep residual neural networks through geometric nonlinear control. Inspired by recent work establishing links between residual networks and control systems, we provide a general sufficient condition for a residual network to have the power of universal approximation by asking the activation function, or one of its derivatives, to satisfy a quadratic differential equation. Many activation functions used in practice satisfy this assumption, exactly or approximately, and we show this property to be sufficient for an adequately deep neural network with $n+1$ neurons per layer to approximate arbitrarily well, on a compact set and with respect to the supremum norm, any continuous function from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}^n$. We further show this result to hold for very simple architectures for which the weights only need to assume two values. The first key technical contribution consists of relating the universal approximation problem to controllability of an ensemble of control systems corresponding to a residual network and to leverage classical Lie algebraic techniques to characterize controllability. The second technical contribution is to identify monotonicity as the bridge between controllability of finite ensembles and uniform approximability on compact sets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2007_06007
institution arXiv
publishDate 2020
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Universal Approximation Power of Deep Residual Neural Networks via Nonlinear Control Theory
Tabuada, Paulo
Gharesifard, Bahman
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
In this paper, we explain the universal approximation capabilities of deep residual neural networks through geometric nonlinear control. Inspired by recent work establishing links between residual networks and control systems, we provide a general sufficient condition for a residual network to have the power of universal approximation by asking the activation function, or one of its derivatives, to satisfy a quadratic differential equation. Many activation functions used in practice satisfy this assumption, exactly or approximately, and we show this property to be sufficient for an adequately deep neural network with $n+1$ neurons per layer to approximate arbitrarily well, on a compact set and with respect to the supremum norm, any continuous function from $\mathbb{R}^n$ to $\mathbb{R}^n$. We further show this result to hold for very simple architectures for which the weights only need to assume two values. The first key technical contribution consists of relating the universal approximation problem to controllability of an ensemble of control systems corresponding to a residual network and to leverage classical Lie algebraic techniques to characterize controllability. The second technical contribution is to identify monotonicity as the bridge between controllability of finite ensembles and uniform approximability on compact sets.
title Universal Approximation Power of Deep Residual Neural Networks via Nonlinear Control Theory
topic Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.06007