Sharp Approximation on the Sphere by Linearized Shallow Networks with Analytic Activations

Abstract

We study the spectral behavior and approximation properties of linearized shallow networks with analytic activation functions on the unit sphere $\mathbb S^d$. Motivated by earlier spherical approximation results for analytic zonal functions \cite{mhaskar1999approximation}, we first derive an asymptotic formula, expressed explicitly in terms of the residues, for the ultraspherical coefficients of a real-analytic function whose relevant singularities are a conjugate pair of simple poles on the imaginary axis. In particular, the formula gives a matching lower bound along the relevant high-degree subsequences and identifies the exponential decay scale and sign oscillation. It applies directly to $\tanh$, the logistic sigmoid, and the rational activations considered here, while the corresponding estimate for $\arctan$ is obtained through differentiation. For such activation functions and quasi-uniform points $\{\theta_j^\ast\}_{j=1}^n \subset \mathbb S^d$, functions $f \in \mathcal H^r(\mathbb S^d)$ satisfying the appropriate spectral compatibility condition can be approximated by a linear combination $$f_n(\eta) = \sum_{j=1}^n a_j \sigma(\theta_j^\ast \cdot \eta),$$ with the sharp Sobolev rate $$\|f - f_n\|_{\mathcal H^s(\mathbb S^d)} \lesssim n^{-\frac{r-s}{d}} \|f\|_{\mathcal H^r(\mathbb S^d)}.$$ The approximation theorem places the $\mathcal H^s$ norm on the left-hand side and simultaneously provides an explicit normalized $\ell^2$ bound on the coefficients. For spectrally compatible analytic target functions, the same construction further gives the stated analytic convergence rate. Thus, the analysis connects spectral asymptotics and lower bounds at the degrees where the ultraspherical coefficients do not vanish with Sobolev-norm approximation and coefficient control for fixed analytic activation functions.