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Related papers: PLU: The Piecewise Linear Unit Activation Function

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Lipschitz-constrained neural networks have many applications in machine learning. Since designing and training expressive Lipschitz-constrained networks is very challenging, there is a need for improved methods and a better theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sebastian Neumayer , Alexis Goujon , Pakshal Bohra , Michael Unser

Activation functions have a notorious impact on neural networks on both training and testing the models against the desired problem. Currently, the most used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). This paper introduces a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Eric Alcaide

We study the problem of learning one-hidden-layer neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function, where the inputs are sampled from standard Gaussian distribution and the outputs are generated from a noisy teacher…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-06-21 Xiao Zhang , Yaodong Yu , Lingxiao Wang , Quanquan Gu

It is commonly recognized that the expressiveness of deep neural networks is contingent upon a range of factors, encompassing their depth, width, and other relevant considerations. Currently, the practical performance of the majority of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-08 Xuan Qi , Yi Wei

Deep learning at its core, contains functions that are composition of a linear transformation with a non-linear function known as activation function. In past few years, there is an increasing interest in construction of novel activation…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

We introduce a variational framework to learn the activation functions of deep neural networks. Our aim is to increase the capacity of the network while controlling an upper-bound of the actual Lipschitz constant of the input-output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Shayan Aziznejad , Harshit Gupta , Joaquim Campos , Michael Unser

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

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

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

When optimizing a nonlinear objective, one can employ a neural network as a surrogate for the nonlinear function. However, the resulting optimization model can be time-consuming to solve globally with exact methods. As a result, local…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Jiatai Tong , Yilin Zhu , Thiago Serra , Samuel Burer

In this article we study high-dimensional approximation capacities of shallow and deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation. In particular, it is a key contribution of this work to reveal that…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-01-23 Lukas Gonon , Robin Graeber , Arnulf Jentzen

Deep neural networks (DNNs), particularly those using Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation functions, have achieved remarkable success across diverse machine learning tasks, including image recognition, audio processing, and language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Emi Zeger , Mert Pilanci

Inducing and leveraging sparse activations during training and inference is a promising avenue for improving the computational efficiency of deep networks, which is increasingly important as network sizes continue to grow and their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Ilan Price , Nicholas Daultry Ball , Samuel C. H. Lam , Adam C. Jones , Jared Tanner

Artificial neural networks typically have a fixed, non-linear activation function at each neuron. We have designed a novel form of piecewise linear activation function that is learned independently for each neuron using gradient descent.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Forest Agostinelli , Matthew Hoffman , Peter Sadowski , Pierre Baldi

Rectified activation units (rectifiers) are essential for state-of-the-art neural networks. In this work, we study rectifier neural networks for image classification from two aspects. First, we propose a Parametric Rectified Linear Unit…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-02-09 Kaiming He , Xiangyu Zhang , Shaoqing Ren , Jian Sun

Deep neural networks have emerged as a widely used and effective means for tackling complex, real-world problems. However, a major obstacle in applying them to safety-critical systems is the great difficulty in providing formal guarantees…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-05-22 Guy Katz , Clark Barrett , David Dill , Kyle Julian , Mykel Kochenderfer

The implementation of analog neural network and online analog learning circuits based on memristive crossbar has been intensively explored in recent years. The implementation of various activation functions is important, especially for deep…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2019-08-28 Meirambek Mukhametkhan , Olga Krestinskaya , Alex Pappachen James

We introduce SPLASH units, a class of learnable activation functions shown to simultaneously improve the accuracy of deep neural networks while also improving their robustness to adversarial attacks. SPLASH units have both a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-17 Mohammadamin Tavakoli , Forest Agostinelli , Pierre Baldi

In this article we identify a general class of high-dimensional continuous functions that can be approximated by deep neural networks (DNNs) with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation without the curse of dimensionality. In other…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Adrian Riekert

Deep neural networks, as a powerful system to represent high dimensional complex functions, play a key role in deep learning. Convergence of deep neural networks is a fundamental issue in building the mathematical foundation for deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Wentao Huang , Yuesheng Xu , Haizhang Zhang