English
Related papers

Related papers: On the Selection of Initialization and Activation …

200 papers

We present a Statistical Mechanics (SM) model of deep neural networks, connecting the energy-based and the feed forward networks (FFN) approach. We infer that FFN can be understood as performing three basic steps: encoding, representation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Mirco Milletarí , Thiparat Chotibut , Paolo E. Trevisanutto

Activation function is a key component in deep learning that performs non-linear mappings between the inputs and outputs. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) has been the most popular activation function across the deep learning community.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Hock Hung Chieng , Noorhaniza Wahid , Pauline Ong

Deep neural networks owe their expressive power to nonlinear activation functions. The effective field theory of signal propagation at initialization reveals a few distinct universality classes of activations that exhibit different depth…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-05-08 Omri Lesser , Debanjan Chowdhury

Deep neural networks are typically initialized with random weights, with variances chosen to facilitate signal propagation and stable gradients. It is also believed that diversity of features is an important property of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-03 Yaniv Blumenfeld , Dar Gilboa , Daniel Soudry

Stable and efficient training of ReLU networks with large depth is highly sensitive to weight initialization. Improper initialization can cause permanent neuron inactivation dying ReLU and exacerbate gradient instability as network depth…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hyungu Lee , Taehyeong Kim , Hayoung Choi

Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Shiv Ram Dubey , Satish Kumar Singh , Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri

Neural networks are powerful functions with widespread use, but the theoretical behaviour of these functions is not fully understood. Creating deep neural networks by stacking many layers has achieved exceptional performance in many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Cameron Jakub , Mihai Nica

The proper initialization of weights is crucial for the effective training and fast convergence of deep neural networks (DNNs). Prior work in this area has mostly focused on balancing the variance among weights per layer to maintain…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-05 Maciej Skorski , Alessandro Temperoni , Martin Theobald

The deep learning literature is continuously updated with new architectures and training techniques. However, weight initialization is overlooked by most recent research, despite some intriguing findings regarding random weights. On the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-19 Leonardo Scabini , Bernard De Baets , Odemir M. Bruno

Activation Functions introduce non-linearity in the deep neural networks. This nonlinearity helps the neural networks learn faster and efficiently from the dataset. In deep learning, many activation functions are developed and used based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Ravin Kumar

Initialization of neural network parameters, such as weights and biases, has a crucial impact on learning performance; if chosen well, we can even avoid the need for additional training with backpropagation. For example, algorithms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hikaru Homma , Jun Ohkubo

The ability to train randomly initialised deep neural networks is known to depend strongly on the variance of the weight matrices and biases as well as the choice of nonlinear activation. Here we complement the existing geometric analysis…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Jared Tanner , Giuseppe Ughi

While neural networks are used for classification tasks across domains, a long-standing open problem in machine learning is determining whether neural networks trained using standard procedures are optimal for classification, i.e., whether…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-03 Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan , Mikhail Belkin , Caroline Uhler

The scope of research in the domain of activation functions remains limited and centered around improving the ease of optimization or generalization quality of neural networks (NNs). However, to develop a deeper understanding of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Mohit Goyal , Rajan Goyal , Brejesh Lall

We study randomly initialized residual networks using mean field theory and the theory of difference equations. Classical feedforward neural networks, such as those with tanh activations, exhibit exponential behavior on the average when…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-12-27 Greg Yang , Samuel S. Schoenholz

We present a simple, effective, and general activation function we term ACON which learns to activate the neurons or not. Interestingly, we find Swish, the recent popular NAS-searched activation, can be interpreted as a smooth approximation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-19 Ningning Ma , Xiangyu Zhang , Ming Liu , Jian Sun

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Alberto Marchisio , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Semeen Rehman , Maurizio Martina , Muhammad Shafique

The study of feature propagation at initialization in neural networks lies at the root of numerous initialization designs. An assumption very commonly made in the field states that the pre-activations are Gaussian. Although this convenient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Pierre Wolinski , Julyan Arbel

It has been noted in existing literature that over-parameterization in ReLU networks generally improves performance. While there could be several factors involved behind this, we prove some desirable theoretical properties at initialization…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-03 Devansh Arpit , Yoshua Bengio

A proper initialization of the weights in a neural network is critical to its convergence. Current insights into weight initialization come primarily from linear activation functions. In this paper, I develop a theory for weight…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-05-04 Siddharth Krishna Kumar