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Related papers: Noisy Activation Functions

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We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

Modelling long-term dependencies is a challenge for recurrent neural networks. This is primarily due to the fact that gradients vanish during training, as the sequence length increases. Gradients can be attenuated by transition operators…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Sarath Chandar , Chinnadhurai Sankar , Eugene Vorontsov , Samira Ebrahimi Kahou , Yoshua Bengio

Activation functions are fundamental for enabling nonlinear representations in deep neural networks. However, the standard rectified linear unit (ReLU) often suffers from inactive or "dead" neurons caused by its hard zero cutoff. To address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Md Motaleb Hossen Manik , Md Zabirul Islam , Ge Wang

Neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent exhibit an inductive bias towards simpler decision boundaries, typically converging to a narrow family of functions, and often fail to capture more complex features. This phenomenon…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-08 Rahul Vashisht , P. Krishna Kumar , Harsha Vardhan Govind , Harish G. Ramaswamy

In this work we analyze the role nonlinear activation functions play at stationary points of dense neural network training problems. We consider a generic least squares loss function training formulation. We show that the nonlinear…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-10 Thomas O'Leary-Roseberry , Omar Ghattas

Activation functions are crucial in graph neural networks (GNNs) as they allow defining a nonlinear family of functions to capture the relationship between the input graph data and their representations. This paper proposes activation…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-16 Bianca Iancu , Luana Ruiz , Alejandro Ribeiro , Elvin Isufi

Activation functions are non-linearities in neural networks that allow them to learn complex mapping between inputs and outputs. Typical choices for activation functions are ReLU, Tanh, Sigmoid etc., where the choice generally depends on…

This work addresses various open questions in the theory of active learning for nonparametric classification. Our contributions are both statistical and algorithmic: -We establish new minimax-rates for active learning under common…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-20 Andrea Locatelli , Alexandra Carpentier , Samory Kpotufe

Machine learning models trained by different optimization algorithms under different data distributions can exhibit distinct generalization behaviors. In this paper, we analyze the generalization of models trained by noisy iterative…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-12-29 Hao Wang , Rui Gao , Flavio P. Calmon

While the concept of a Sparse Neural Network has been researched for some time, researchers have only recently made notable progress in the matter. Techniques like Sparse Evolutionary Training allow for significantly lower computational…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Adam Dubowski

Activation functions are essential to deep learning networks. Popular and versatile activation functions are mostly monotonic functions, some non-monotonic activation functions are being explored and show promising performance. But by…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Junjia Chen , Zhibin Pan

Activation functions are critical components in deep neural networks, directly influencing gradient flow, training stability, and model performance. Traditional functions like ReLU suffer from dead neuron problems, while sigmoid and tanh…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sergii Kavun

The stunning empirical successes of neural networks currently lack rigorous theoretical explanation. What form would such an explanation take, in the face of existing complexity-theoretic lower bounds? A first step might be to show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Le Song , Santosh Vempala , John Wilmes , Bo Xie

We propose a stochastic dynamical model of noisy neural networks with complex architectures and discuss activation of neural networks by a stimulus, pacemakers and spontaneous activity. This model has a complex phase diagram with…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2015-05-13 A. V. Goltsev , F. V. de Abreu , S. N. Dorogovtsev , J. F. F. Mendes

Neural network models are known to reinforce hidden data biases, making them unreliable and difficult to interpret. We seek to build models that `know what they do not know' by introducing inductive biases in the function space. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Lassi Meronen , Martin Trapp , Arno Solin

Saliency methods have been widely used to highlight important input features in model predictions. Most existing methods use backpropagation on a modified gradient function to generate saliency maps. Thus, noisy gradients can result in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Aya Abdelsalam Ismail , Héctor Corrada Bravo , Soheil Feizi

Stochastic neurons and hard non-linearities can be useful for a number of reasons in deep learning models, but in many cases they pose a challenging problem: how to estimate the gradient of a loss function with respect to the input of such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-08-16 Yoshua Bengio , Nicholas Léonard , Aaron Courville

Activation functions shape the outputs of artificial neurons and, therefore, are integral parts of neural networks in general and deep learning in particular. Some activation functions, such as logistic and relu, have been used for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Johannes Lederer

As a general method for exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL), NoisyNet can produce problem-specific exploration strategies. Spiking neural networks (SNNs), due to their binary firing mechanism, have strong robustness to noise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Ding Chen , Peixi Peng , Tiejun Huang , Yonghong Tian

Training Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with small batches using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) yields superior test performance compared to larger batches. The specific noise structure inherent to SGD is known to be responsible for this…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-02-14 Tom Sander , Maxime Sylvestre , Alain Durmus