Representation Costs in Data Science: Foundations and the Quasi-Banach Spaces of Deep Neural Networks
Greg Ongie, Rahul Parhi
Abstract
We develop a general framework for analyzing representation costs induced by parameter-space regularizers in data-fitting methods. For an arbitrary parametric method, we define its representation cost and native function space, prove existence, and identify conditions under which parameter-space and function-space problems have equal infimal values and minimizers transfer between them. This framework yields representer theorems and recovers classical formulations---including kernel methods and RKHSs, wavelets and Besov spaces, and shallow neural networks and variation spaces---as special cases. Our main new results concern depth-$L$ feedforward ReLU networks with weight-decay regularization. For these networks, we prove that the representation cost is a power of a quasi-seminorm and that, under suitable hypotheses, the native space is a quasi-Banach space with nonconvex unit ball when $L > 2$. These results identify a novel depth-dependent quasi-Banach function-space geometry induced by weight decay.
Topics
Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.