Deep ReLU neural network emulation in high-frequency acoustic scattering

We obtain wavenumber-robust error bounds for the deep neural network (DNN) emulation of the solution to the time-harmonic, sound-soft acoustic scattering problem in the exterior of a smooth, convex obstacle in two physical dimensions. The error bounds are based on a boundary reduction of the scattering problem in the unbounded exterior region to its smooth, curved boundary Γ using the so-called combined field integral equation (CFIE), a well-posed, second-kind boundary integral equation (BIE) for the field's Neumann datum on Γ. In this setting, the continuity and stability constants of this formulation are explicit in terms of the (non-dimensional) wavenumber κ. Using wavenumber-explicit asymptotics of the problem's Neumann datum, we analyze the DNN approximation rate for this problem.We use fully connected NNs of the feed-forward type with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation. Through a constructive argument we prove the existence of DNNs with an ε-error bound in the L^∞(Γ)-norm having a small, fixed width and a depth that increases spectrally with the target accuracy ε>0. We show that for fixed ε>0, the depth of these NNs should increase poly-logarithmically with respect to the wavenumber κ whereas the width of the NN remains fixed. Unlike current computational approaches %tackling this problem, such as wavenumber-adapted versions of the Galerkin Boundary Element Method (BEM) with shape- and wavenumber-tailored solution ansatz spaces the presently considered DNN approximations do not require prior analytic information about the scatterer's shape.