English

SAU: Smooth activation function using convolution with approximate identities

Machine Learning 2021-09-28 v1 Artificial Intelligence Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Neural and Evolutionary Computing

Abstract

Well-known activation functions like ReLU or Leaky ReLU are non-differentiable at the origin. Over the years, many smooth approximations of ReLU have been proposed using various smoothing techniques. We propose new smooth approximations of a non-differentiable activation function by convolving it with approximate identities. In particular, we present smooth approximations of Leaky ReLU and show that they outperform several well-known activation functions in various datasets and models. We call this function Smooth Activation Unit (SAU). Replacing ReLU by SAU, we get 5.12% improvement with ShuffleNet V2 (2.0x) model on CIFAR100 dataset.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2109.13210,
  title  = {SAU: Smooth activation function using convolution with approximate identities},
  author = {Koushik Biswas and Sandeep Kumar and Shilpak Banerjee and Ashish Kumar Pandey},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.13210},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2109.04386

R2 v1 2026-06-24T06:23:41.366Z