F. Voigtlaender

A. Caragea, D. G. Lee, J. Maly et al.

Until recently, applications of neural networks in machine learning have almost exclusively relied on real-valued networks. It was recently observed, however, that complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) exhibit superior performance in applications in which the input is naturally complex-valued, such as MRI fingerprinting. While the mathematical theory of real-valued networks has, by now, reached some level of maturity, this is far from true for complex-valued networks. In this paper, we analyze the expressivity of complex-valued networks by providing explicit quantitative error bounds for approximating $C^n$ functions on compact subsets of $\mathbb{C}^d$ by complex-valued neural networks that employ the modReLU activation function, given by $σ(z) = \mathrm{ReLU}(|z| - 1) \, \mathrm{sgn} (z)$, which is one of the most popular complex activation functions used in practice. We show that the derived approximation rates are optimal (up to log factors) in the class of modReLU networks with weights of moderate growth.

J. M. Almira, P. E. Lopez-de-Teruel, D. J. Romero-Lopez et al.

We prove a negative result for the approximation of functions defined on compact subsets of $\mathbb{R}^d$ (where $d \geq 2$) using feedforward neural networks with one hidden layer and arbitrary continuous activation function. In a nutshell, this result claims the existence of target functions that are as difficult to approximate using these neural networks as one may want. We also demonstrate an analogous result (for general $d \in \mathbb{N}$) for neural networks with an \emph{arbitrary} number of hidden layers, for activation functions that are either rational functions or continuous splines with finitely many pieces.