On Expressivity of Height in Neural Networks
This work addresses the challenge of improving neural network capacity for researchers and practitioners by proposing a novel architectural dimension, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing width-depth frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of enhancing neural network expressivity by introducing a new dimension called height through intra-layer links, showing that 3D networks (width, depth, height) generate more piecewise linear pieces and achieve better polynomial approximation rates than 2D networks with the same parameters, with empirical validation on synthetic, tabular, and image datasets.
In this work, beyond width and depth, we augment a neural network with a new dimension called height by intra-linking neurons in the same layer to create an intra-layer hierarchy, which gives rise to the notion of height. We call a neural network characterized by width, depth, and height a 3D network. To put a 3D network in perspective, we theoretically and empirically investigate the expressivity of height. We show via bound estimation and explicit construction that given the same number of neurons and parameters, a 3D ReLU network of width $W$, depth $K$, and height $H$ has greater expressive power than a 2D network of width $H\times W$ and depth $K$, \textit{i.e.}, $\mathcal{O}((2^H-1)W)^K)$ vs $\mathcal{O}((HW)^K)$, in terms of generating more pieces in a piecewise linear function. Next, through approximation rate analysis, we show that by introducing intra-layer links into networks, a ReLU network of width $\mathcal{O}(W)$ and depth $\mathcal{O}(K)$ can approximate polynomials in $[0,1]^d$ with error $\mathcal{O}\left(2^{-2WK}\right)$, which improves $\mathcal{O}\left(W^{-K}\right)$ and $\mathcal{O}\left(2^{-K}\right)$ for fixed width networks. Lastly, numerical experiments on 5 synthetic datasets, 15 tabular datasets, and 3 image benchmarks verify that 3D networks can deliver competitive regression and classification performance.