On Linear Separability of the MNIST Handwritten Digits Dataset

Neural networks build representations through affine maps and nonlinear activations. Injective affine maps preserve linear separability, raising the problem of how they prepare data for nonlinear improvement and how much gain can be guaranteed before complete separation. We introduce the directional linear separability measure (D-LSM), which quantifies unavoidable competing-sample intrusion over affine halfspaces retaining every target sample, characterize its supporting geometry, and prove invariance under injective affine embeddings. For gated activations including ReLU, GELU, and SiLU, pre-activation projection bounds yield sufficient conditions for preserving all previous exclusions and recovering additional samples, with a gain bound determined by the certified recovery count. Under an aggregate-tube condition, an explicit affine construction realizes recovery with sufficient width, scaling conditions, and simultaneous multiclass guarantees through a shared layer. Exact controlled experiments compare certified and realized gains, assess certificate coverage, and exhibit bound attainment before complete separation and in affine-tube constructions. In learned Vision Transformer (ViT) representations, a feasible lower-bound estimator yields earlier post-GELU saturation certificates of exact separability, while boundary transport numerically supports affine invariance.

Relocation of compact sets in an $n$-dimensional manifold by self-diffeomorphism is of its own interest as well as significant potential applications to data classification in data science. This paper presents a theory for relocating a finite number of compact sets in $\mathbb{R}^n$ to be relocated to arbitrary target domains in $\mathbb{R}^n$ by diffeomorphisms of $\mathbb{R}^n$. Furthermore, we prove that for any such collection, there exists a differentiable embedding into $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ such that their images become linearly separable. As applications of the established theory, we show that a finite number of compact datasets in $\mathbb{R}^n$ can be made linearly separable by width-$n$ deep neural networks (DNNs) with Leaky-ReLU, ELU, or SELU activation functions, under a mild condition. In addition, we show that any finite number of mutually disjoint compact datasets in $\mathbb{R}^n$ can be made linearly separable in $\mathbb{R}^{n+1}$ by a width-$(n+1)$ DNN.

This paper proposes a method for constructing a neural network that achieves perfect classification of all samples in a given training set, without taking regularization into account. The network is constructed on-demand, with its layer sizes and neuron parameters determined through a geometrical analysis of the input data, in which separating hyperplanes are created and mapped to neurons with step activation functions. The proposed architecture consists of two hidden layers with distinct roles: inter-class separation and transformation of the data into a linearly separable representation. Inter-class separation requires every bi-chromatic pair of samples belonging to different classes to be separated by at least one hyperplane. We show that when this separation is achieved through a hierarchical partitioning of the data, the leaf nodes of the oblique decision tree, obtained as a byproduct, directly define the neurons of the linear separability layer, whose size is only one neuron greater than that of the inter-class separation layer. Experiments on the MNIST dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves perfect training-set classification, and compact models. The direct correspondence between the decision tree and network neurons enhances interpretability and explainability, while the construction procedure offers opportunities for parallel implementation and improved scalability.