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ErfAct and Pserf: Non-monotonic Smooth Trainable Activation Functions

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2022-03-25 v4 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Machine Learning

Abstract

An activation function is a crucial component of a neural network that introduces non-linearity in the network. The state-of-the-art performance of a neural network depends also on the perfect choice of an activation function. We propose two novel non-monotonic smooth trainable activation functions, called ErfAct and Pserf. Experiments suggest that the proposed functions improve the network performance significantly compared to the widely used activations like ReLU, Swish, and Mish. Replacing ReLU by ErfAct and Pserf, we have 5.68% and 5.42% improvement for top-1 accuracy on Shufflenet V2 (2.0x) network in CIFAR100 dataset, 2.11% and 1.96% improvement for top-1 accuracy on Shufflenet V2 (2.0x) network in CIFAR10 dataset, 1.0%, and 1.0% improvement on mean average precision (mAP) on SSD300 model in Pascal VOC dataset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.04386,
  title  = {ErfAct and Pserf: Non-monotonic Smooth Trainable Activation Functions},
  author = {Koushik Biswas and Sandeep Kumar and Shilpak Banerjee and Ashish Kumar Pandey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.04386},
  year   = {2022}
}

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AAAI 2022

R2 v1 2026-06-24T05:49:56.689Z