Sharp Sobolev Approximation on General Domains by Linearized Shallow Networks with Analytic Activations

Abstract

We study Sobolev approximation on bounded domains by linearized shallow neural networks whose inner parameters are prescribed independently of the target function. Our main step is a one-dimensional construction for analytic activations. We prove that quasi-Chebyshev parameter sets with univariate resolution $m$ generate fixed feature spaces attaining the sharp $H^r$-to-$H^s$ approximation order $m^{-(r-s)}$ for a class of analytic activations satisfying a quantitative non-cancellation condition on their Taylor coefficients. Combining this result with the ridge-function lifting theorem in [SIAM J. Math. Anal. 30 (1998), pp. 155-189] and its extension to arbitrary quasi-uniform direction sets established in this work, we construct tensor-product-type parameter sets that attain the sharp rate $$\|f-f_n\|_{L^2(\Omega)}\lesssim n^{-\frac rd}\|f\|_{H^r(\Omega)},\quad f\in H^r(\Omega)$$ for all $r>0$. In contrast to the finite-difference construction in [Neural Comput. 8 (1996), pp. 164-177], whose explicit admissibility condition may require an extremely small parameter scale, the proposed parameter sets remain distributed over fixed intervals and are therefore more amenable to practical computation.