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The widely used ReLU is favored for its hardware efficiency, {as the implementation at inference is a one bit sign case,} yet suffers from issues such as the ``dying ReLU'' problem, where during training, neurons fail to activate and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Moshe Kimhi , Idan Kashani , Avi Mendelson , Chaim Baskin

A wide variety of activation functions have been proposed for neural networks. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is especially popular today. There are many practical reasons that motivate the use of the ReLU. This paper provides new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Rahul Parhi , Robert D. Nowak

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

The nonlinearity of activation functions used in deep learning models are crucial for the success of predictive models. There are several commonly used simple nonlinear functions, including Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) and Leaky-ReLU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-16 Nalinda Kulathunga , Nishath Rajiv Ranasinghe , Daniel Vrinceanu , Zackary Kinsman , Lei Huang , Yunjiao Wang

Current research suggests that the key factors in designing neural network architectures involve choosing number of filters for every convolution layer, number of hidden neurons for every fully connected layer, dropout and pruning. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Himanshu Pradeep Aswani , Amit Sethi

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

This paper explores the expressive power of deep neural networks for a diverse range of activation functions. An activation function set $\mathscr{A}$ is defined to encompass the majority of commonly used activation functions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Shijun Zhang , Jianfeng Lu , Hongkai Zhao

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

Even in recent neural network architectures such as Transformers and Extended LSTM (xLSTM), and traditional ones like Convolutional Neural Networks, Activation Functions are an integral part of nearly all neural networks. They enable more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Matias Roodschild , Jorge Gotay-Sardiñas , Victor A. Jimenez , Adrian Will

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

Modern DNN workloads increasingly rely on activation functions consisting of computationally complex operations. This poses a challenge to current accelerators optimized for convolutions and matrix-matrix multiplications. This work presents…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Enrico Reggiani , Renzo Andri , Lukas Cavigelli

The choice of activation functions in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. Currently, the most successful and widely-used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). Although…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-10-30 Prajit Ramachandran , Barret Zoph , Quoc V. Le

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 functions play a decisive role in determining the capacity of Deep Neural Networks as they enable neural networks to capture inherent nonlinearities present in data fed to them. The prior research on activation functions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Faiza Makhdoom , Dianchen Lu

Most deep neural networks use simple, fixed activation functions, such as sigmoids or rectified linear units, regardless of domain or network structure. We introduce differential equation units (DEUs), an improvement to modern neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 MohamadAli Torkamani , Phillip Wallis , Shiv Shankar , Amirmohammad Rooshenas

Activation functions play a critical role in the performance and behaviour of neural networks, significantly impacting their ability to learn and generalise. Traditional activation functions, such as ReLU, sigmoid, and tanh, have been…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Benjamin David Winter , William John Teahan

A general procedure for introducing parametric, learned, nonlinearity into activation functions is found to enhance the accuracy of representative neural networks without requiring significant additional computational resources. Examples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 David Yevick

Recently, neural networks have been widely applied in the power system area. They can be used for better predicting input information and modeling system performance with increased accuracy. In some applications such as battery degradation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Cunzhi Zhao , Fan Jiang , Xingpeng Li

Deep learning is currently extensively employed across a range of research domains. The continuous advancements in deep learning techniques contribute to solving intricate challenges. Activation functions (AF) are fundamental components…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Asmaa Benchama , Khalid Zebbara

Recently, self-normalizing neural networks (SNNs) have been proposed with the intention to avoid batch or weight normalization. The key step in SNNs is to properly scale the exponential linear unit (referred to as SELU) to inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-30 G. Zhang , H. Li