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Related papers: PLU: The Piecewise Linear Unit Activation Function

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The most widely used activation functions in current deep feed-forward neural networks are rectified linear units (ReLU), and many alternatives have been successfully applied, as well. However, none of the alternatives have managed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-27 Leon René Sütfeld , Flemming Brieger , Holger Finger , Sonja Füllhase , Gordon Pipa

Rectified linear unit (ReLU) is a widely used activation function for deep convolutional neural networks. However, because of the zero-hard rectification, ReLU networks miss the benefits from negative values. In this paper, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Suo Qiu , Xiangmin Xu , Bolun Cai

Activation function is crucial to the recent successes of deep neural networks. In this paper, we first propose a new activation function, Multiple Parametric Exponential Linear Units (MPELU), aiming to generalize and unify the rectified…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-01-18 Yang Li , Chunxiao Fan , Yong Li , Qiong Wu , Yue Ming

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

In this paper, we introduce "Power Linear Unit" (PoLU) which increases the nonlinearity capacity of a neural network and thus helps improving its performance. PoLU adopts several advantages of previously proposed activation functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-02 Yikang Li , Pak Lun Kevin Ding , Baoxin Li

Activation functions have been shown to affect the performance of deep neural networks significantly. While the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the dominant choice in practice, the optimal activation function for deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 John Chidiac , Danielle Azar

In recent years, functional neural networks have been proposed and studied in order to approximate nonlinear continuous functionals defined on $L^p([-1, 1]^s)$ for integers $s\ge1$ and $1\le p<\infty$. However, their theoretical properties…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-11 Linhao Song , Jun Fan , Di-Rong Chen , Ding-Xuan Zhou

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

We propose the Moderate Adaptive Linear Unit (MoLU), a novel activation function for deep neural networks, defined analytically as: f(x)=x \times (1+tanh(x))/2. MoLU combines mathematical elegance with empirical effectiveness, exhibiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Hankyul Koh , Joon-hyuk Ko , Wonho Jhe

Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) have been shown to ameliorate the vanishing gradient problem, allow for efficient backpropagation, and empirically promote sparsity in the learned parameters. They have led to state-of-the-art results in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Xingyuan Pan , Vivek Srikumar

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

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

The choice of activation function can have a large effect on the performance of a neural network. While there have been some attempts to hand-engineer novel activation functions, the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Garrett Bingham , William Macke , Risto Miikkulainen

Activation functions play a crucial role in neural networks because they are the nonlinearities which have been attributed to the success story of deep learning. One of the currently most popular activation functions is ReLU, but several…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Steffen Eger , Paul Youssef , Iryna Gurevych

Activation function is a pivotal component of deep learning, facilitating the extraction of intricate data patterns. While classical activation functions like ReLU and its variants are extensively utilized, their static nature and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Barathi Subramanian , Rathinaraja Jeyaraj , Rakhmonov Akhrorjon Akhmadjon Ugli

Activation functions play a key role in providing remarkable performance in deep neural networks, and the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is one of the most widely used activation functions. Various new activation functions and improvements on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Yang Liu , Jianpeng Zhang , Chao Gao , Jinghua Qu , Lixin Ji

We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU activation function is $x\Phi(x)$, where $\Phi(x)$ the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Dan Hendrycks , Kevin Gimpel

Deep neural networks yield the state-of-the-art results in many computer vision and human machine interface applications such as object detection, speech recognition etc. Since, these networks are computationally expensive, customized…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2020-09-25 Mahesh Chandra

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved unprecedented performance in many low-level vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art results are typically achieved by very deep networks, which can reach tens of layers with tens of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Idan Kligvasser , Tamar Rott Shaham , Tomer Michaeli

We contribute to a better understanding of the class of functions that can be represented by a neural network with ReLU activations and a given architecture. Using techniques from mixed-integer optimization, polyhedral theory, and tropical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Christoph Hertrich , Amitabh Basu , Marco Di Summa , Martin Skutella