arXiv:2605.11652v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study posterior contraction rates for sparse Bayesian Kolmogorov-Arnold networks (KANs) over anisotropic Besov spaces, providing a statistical foundation for KANs from a Bayesian point of view. We show that sparse Bayesian KANs equipped with spike-and-slab-type sparsity priors attain a near-minimax posterior contraction rate. In particular, the contraction rate depends on the intrinsic anisotropic smoothness of the underlying function. Moreover, by placing a hyperprior on a single model-size parameter, the resulting posterior adapts to unknown anisotropic smoothness and still achieves the corresponding near-minimax rate. A distinctive feature of our results, compared with those for standard multilayer perceptrons, is that the KAN depth can be kept fixed: owing to the expressive power of learnable spline edge functions, the required approximation complexity is controlled through the network width, the range and size of the spline grid, and parameter sparsity. Our analysis develops theoretical tools tailored to sparse spline-edge architectures, including approximation and complexity bounds for Bayesian KANs. We then extend to compositional Besov spaces and show that the contraction rates depend on layerwise smoothness and effective dimension of the underlying compositional structure, thereby effectively avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Together, these results advance the theoretical understanding of Bayesian neural networks and establish rigorous Bayesian guarantees for KANs.