Four Ways to Grow a Classifier and Why One of Them Cannot Learn

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Constructive classifiers add structure while they train: a level to a tree, a unit to a hidden layer, a split at a leaf. This paper asks what each of four such growth decisions actually buys, measured under one fixed protocol in tree-structured and constructive models, and gives an exact diagnosis and a fix for the one that buys nothing. The diagnosis concerns the most natural way to deepen a soft decision tree: turn every leaf into a gate whose tw