The two most critical ingredients of a neural network are its structure and the activation function employed, and more importantly, the proper alignment of these two that is conducive to the effective representation and learning in practice. In this work, we introduce a surprisingly effective synergy, termed the Fourier Multi-Component and Multi-Layer Neural Network (FMMNN), and demonstrate its surprising adaptability and efficiency in capturing high-frequency components. First, we theoretically establish that FMMNNs have exponential expressive power in terms of approximation capacity. Next, we analyze the optimization landscape of FMMNNs and show that it is significantly more favorable compared to fully connected neural networks. Finally, systematic and extensive numerical experiments validate our findings, demonstrating that FMMNNs consistently achieve superior accuracy and efficiency across various tasks, particularly impressive when high-frequency components are present.

In this work, we propose a balanced multi-component and multi-layer neural network (MMNN) structure to approximate functions with complex features with both accuracy and efficiency in terms of degrees of freedom and computation cost. The main idea is motivated by a multi-component, each of which can be approximated effectively by a single-layer network, and multi-layer decomposition in a "divide-and-conquer" type of strategy to deal with a complex function. While an easy modification to fully connected neural networks (FCNNs) or multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) through the introduction of balanced multi-component structures in the network, MMNNs achieve a significant reduction of training parameters, a much more efficient training process, and a much improved accuracy compared to FCNNs or MLPs. Extensive numerical experiments are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of MMNNs in approximating high oscillatory functions and its automatic adaptivity in capturing localized features.

This paper proposes an unsupervised learning technique by using Multi-layer Mirroring Neural Network and Forgy's clustering algorithm. Multi-layer Mirroring Neural Network is a neural network that can be trained with generalized data inputs (different categories of image patterns) to perform non-linear dimensionality reduction and the resultant low-dimensional code is used for unsupervised pattern classification using Forgy's algorithm. By adapting the non-linear activation function (modified sigmoidal function) and initializing the weights and bias terms to small random values, mirroring of the input pattern is initiated. In training, the weights and bias terms are changed in such a way that the input presented is reproduced at the output by back propagating the error. The mirroring neural network is capable of reducing the input vector to a great degree (approximately 1/30th the original size) and also able to reconstruct the input pattern at the output layer from this reduced code units. The feature set (output of central hidden layer) extracted from this network is fed to Forgy's algorithm, which classify input data patterns into distinguishable classes. In the implementation of Forgy's algorithm, initial seed points are selected in such a way that they are distant enough to be perfectly grouped into different categories. Thus a new method of unsupervised learning is formulated and demonstrated in this paper. This method gave impressive results when applied to classification of different image patterns.