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Binary neural networks improve computationally efficiency of deep models with a large margin. However, there is still a performance gap between a successful full-precision training and binary training. We bring some insights about why this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-22 Xinlin Li , Vahid Partovi Nia

We study the expressivity of deep neural networks. Measuring a network's complexity by its number of connections or by its number of neurons, we consider the class of functions for which the error of best approximation with networks of a…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2020-07-20 Rémi Gribonval , Gitta Kutyniok , Morten Nielsen , Felix Voigtlaender

Nonlinear activation functions are widely recognized for enhancing the expressivity of neural networks, which is the primary reason for their widespread implementation. In this work, we focus on ReLU activation and reveal a novel and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chaoyue Liu , Han Bi , Like Hui , Xiao Liu

Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) are among the most widely used activation function in a broad variety of tasks in vision. Recent theoretical results suggest that despite their excellent practical performance, in various cases, a substitution…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Vishnu Suresh Lokhande , Songwong Tasneeyapant , Abhay Venkatesh , Sathya N. Ravi , Vikas Singh

An artificial neuron is modelled as a weighted summation followed by an activation function which determines its output. A wide variety of activation functions such as rectified linear units (ReLU), leaky-ReLU, Swish, MISH, etc. have been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-30 Fayyaz ul Amir Afsar Minhas , Amina Asif

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) powered by neural net approximation of the Q function has had enormous empirical success. While the theory of RL has traditionally focused on linear function approximation (or eluder dimension) approaches,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-28 Baihe Huang , Kaixuan Huang , Sham M. Kakade , Jason D. Lee , Qi Lei , Runzhe Wang , Jiaqi Yang

We describe an algorithm that learns two-layer residual units using rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation: suppose the input $\mathbf{x}$ is from a distribution with support space $\mathbb{R}^d$ and the ground-truth generative model is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Zhunxuan Wang , Linyun He , Chunchuan Lyu , Shay B. Cohen

Activation functions play a vital role in the training of Convolutional Neural Networks. For this reason, to develop efficient and performing functions is a crucial problem in the deep learning community. Key to these approaches is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Gianluca Maguolo , Loris Nanni , Stefano Ghidoni

Gradient-based neural network training traditionally enforces symmetry between forward and backward propagation, requiring activation functions to be differentiable (or sub-differentiable) and strictly monotonic in certain regions to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Luigi Troiano , Francesco Gissi , Vincenzo Benedetto , Genny Tortora

Rectified linear units, or ReLUs, have become the preferred activation function for artificial neural networks. In this paper we consider two basic learning problems assuming that the underlying data follow a generative model based on a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-13 Arya Mazumdar , Ankit Singh Rawat

Neural networks can be trained to solve regression problems by using gradient-based methods to minimize the square loss. However, practitioners often prefer to reformulate regression as a classification problem, observing that training on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Lawrence Stewart , Francis Bach , Quentin Berthet , Jean-Philippe Vert

We draw connections between simple neural networks and under-determined linear systems to comprehensively explore several interesting theoretical questions in the study of neural networks. First, we emphatically show that it is unsurprising…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-11-02 Austin R. Benson , Anil Damle , Alex Townsend

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are widely studied in various applications. A DNN consists of layers of neurons that compute affine combinations, apply nonlinear operations, and produce corresponding activations. The rectified linear unit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-13 Navid Aftabi , Nima Moradi , Fatemeh Mahroo

We consider approximation rates of sparsely connected deep rectified linear unit (ReLU) and rectified power unit (RePU) neural networks for functions in Besov spaces $B^\alpha_{q}(L^p)$ in arbitrary dimension $d$, on general domains. We…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2022-03-25 Mazen Ali , Anthony Nouy

Activation functions play a key role in neural networks so it becomes fundamental to understand their advantages and disadvantages in order to achieve better performances. This paper will first introduce common types of non linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Dabal Pedamonti

Deep learning has been widely used in many fields, but the model training process usually consumes massive computational resources and time. Therefore, designing an efficient neural network training method with a provable convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Lianke Qin , Zhao Song , Yuanyuan Yang

Neural networks with REctified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation functions (a.k.a. ReLU networks) have achieved great empirical success in various domains. Nonetheless, existing results for learning ReLU networks either pose assumptions on the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-01 Gang Wang , Georgios B. Giannakis , Jie Chen

The paper proposes representation functionals in a dual paradigm where learning jointly concerns both linear convolutional weights and parametric forms of nonlinear activation functions. The nonlinear forms proposed for performing the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Abdourrahmane Mahamane Atto , Sylvie Galichet , Dominique Pastor , Nicolas Méger

Activation functions in neural networks are typically selected from a set of empirically validated, commonly used static functions such as ReLU, tanh, or sigmoid. However, by optimizing the shapes of a network's activation functions, we can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 William H Patty

This document proposes a parametric activation function (ac.f.) aimed at improving multidimensional nonlinear data regression. It is a established knowledge that nonlinear ac.f's are required for learning nonlinear datasets. This work shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Enda D. V. Bigarella