Approximation of solutions of parameter-dependent problems by residual neural networks

Rigorous results show that feedforward neural networks can overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs), but comparatively little is known about residual neural networks (ResNets) in the nonlinear PDE setting. We prove that ResNets overcome the curse of dimensionality in the numerical approximation of solutions of semilinear heat equations with globally Lipschitz continuous, gradient-independent nonlinearities: under polynomial growth and network approximability hypotheses on the PDE data, there exist $η\in(0,\infty)$ and ResNets $Ψ_{d,\varepsilon}$, $d\in\mathbb{N}$, $\varepsilon\in(0,1]$, with at most $ηd^η\varepsilon^{-η}$ parameters whose realizations approximate the solution in dimension $d$ with an $L^2$-error of at most $\varepsilon$. The proof represents one deterministic realization of a multilevel Picard estimator by a ResNet whose shortcut connections transmit the spatial variable and a scalar accumulator, while the residual branches successively add the summands of the estimator. For ridge-sum initial conditions, admissible sigmoidal activations, and globally Lipschitz truncations of the nonlinearity, we obtain, for every $ξ>0$, the explicit bound $C_ξd^{4+ξ}\varepsilon^{-(3+ξ)}$ on the number of parameters.

We develop a rigorous theory of discrete residual least-squares approximation for elliptic spectral equations $\mathfrak L_βu=f$ using linearized ReLU$^k$ neural networks on the sphere, where $\mathfrak L_β$ is a positive elliptic spectral multiplier of order $β$. Given a parameter set $Θ_n=\{θ_{j}^*\}_{j=1}^n\subset\mathbb S^d$, we approximate $u$ in the linearized network space $L_n^k(Θ_n)$ by the discrete residual on the collocation points $\{η_i^*\}_{i=1}^m$ \begin{equation*} u_{n,m}\in\arg\min_{v_n\in L_n^k(Θ_n)}\frac1m\sum_{i=1}^m\left(f(η_i^)-\mathfrak L_βv_n(η_i^)\right)^2. \end{equation*} With $k>\frac{d-1}{2}+β$, for antipodally quasi-uniform network parameter sets and any quasi-uniform collocation points with $m\gtrsim n$, we prove that \begin{equation*} |u-u_{n,m}|{\mathcal H^β(\mathbb S^d)}\eqsim|f-\mathfrak L_βu{n,m}|{\mathcal L^2(\mathbb S^d)}\lesssim n^{-\frac{r}{d}} \begin{cases} |f|{\mathcal W^{r,p}(\mathbb S^d)},&\frac{d}{p}<r\leq \frac{d}{2},~p>2,\ |f|{\mathcal H^r(\mathbb S^d)},&r>\frac{d}{2}. \end{cases} \end{equation*} We also establish a high-probability residual estimate, up to a logarithmic factor and an arbitrarily small smoothness loss, for i.i.d.\ uniformly distributed collocation points. The key analytical ingredient is a Bernstein inequality for linearized ReLU$^k$ network spaces. If $\underline h$ denotes the antipodal separation distance of the network parameters, then \begin{equation*} |v_n|{\mathcal H^r(\mathbb S^d)}\lesssim\underline h^{-(r-s)}|v_n|_{\mathcal H^s(\mathbb S^d)},\qquad 0\leq s<r<k+\tfrac12. \end{equation*}

Neural surrogate models offer fast approximate mappings from PDE parameters to solutions, but they typically treat solving as a purely statistical task: once trained, they struggle to correct their own constraint violations and extrapolate beyond the training distribution. Recent hybrid methods promote physical correctness by targeting the PDE residual via gradient descent or Gauss--Newton steps, but inherit the compute cost and instability of the underlying classical optimizers. We show, theoretically and empirically, that numerically minimizing the PDE residual can be an unreliable proxy for reconstruction accuracy in ill-conditioned systems, explaining why these methods often do not make accurate predictions despite achieving low residuals. We propose error-conditioned Neural Solvers (ENS), built on a different principle: rather than an optimization target, the PDE residual field is passed as a direct input to the network at each iteration, enabling it to read the spatial structure of its own errors and learn an update policy to iteratively correct its predictions. Across four PDE families, ENS attains the highest prediction accuracy in the large majority of settings, with gains reaching $10\times$ on turbulent Kolmogorov flow, while avoiding the expensive compute cost of hybrid methods. ENS's learned correction policy generalizes under distribution shift, including zero-shot parameter changes and cross-equation transfer, where its relative advantage is largest in the ill-conditioned regimes where residual minimization is least reliable. Project website: https://neuralsolver.github.io/.