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A pivotal aspect in the design of neural networks lies in selecting activation functions, crucial for introducing nonlinear structures that capture intricate input-output patterns. While the effectiveness of adaptive or trainable activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki , Tahamina Nasrin , Robert E. Jensen , Amy M. Peterson , Christopher J. Hansen

In this paper, we explore the concept of adding learn-able slope and mean shift parameters to an activation function to improve the total response region. The characteristics of an activation function depend highly on the value of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 S. Balaji , T. Kavya , Natasha Sebastian

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

Activation function has a significant impact on the dynamics, convergence, and performance of deep neural networks. The search for a consistent and high-performing activation function has always been a pursuit during deep learning model…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Abdur Rahman , Lu He , Haifeng Wang

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) by utilizing sparse and asynchronous processing through discrete spike-based computation. However, the performance of deep…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Eric Jahns , Davi Moreno , Michel A. Kinsy

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

We extended the work of proposed activation function, Noisy Softplus, to fit into training of layered up spiking neural networks (SNNs). Thus, any ANN employing Noisy Softplus neurons, even of deep architecture, can be trained simply by the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-06-13 Qian Liu , Yunhua Chen , Steve Furber

Activation functions are critical to the performance of deep neural networks, particularly in domains such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), where nonlinearity, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and signal variability poses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Behtom Adeli , John McLinden , Pankaj Pandey , Ming Shao , Yalda Shahriari

In the current research of neural networks, the activation function is manually specified by human and not able to change themselves during training. This paper focus on how to make the activation function trainable for deep neural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Zhaohe Liao

Activation functions have come up as one of the essential components of neural networks. The choice of adequate activation function can impact the accuracy of these methods. In this study, we experiment for finding an optimal activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Vipul Bansal

Neural networks are universal function approximators which are known to generalize well despite being dramatically overparameterized. We study this phenomenon from the point of view of the spectral bias of neural networks. Our contributions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-07 Qingguo Hong , Jonathan W. Siegel , Qinyang Tan , Jinchao Xu

Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuhao Liu , Zilin Wang , Lei Wu , Shaobo Zhang

Activation functions are crucial in graph neural networks (GNNs) as they allow defining a nonlinear family of functions to capture the relationship between the input graph data and their representations. This paper proposes activation…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-16 Bianca Iancu , Luana Ruiz , Alejandro Ribeiro , Elvin Isufi

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

Many neural network architectures rely on the choice of the activation function for each hidden layer. Given the activation function, the neural network is trained over the bias and the weight parameters. The bias catches the center of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Farnoush Farhadi , Vahid Partovi Nia , Andrea Lodi

Deep learning training training algorithms are a huge success in recent years in many fields including speech, text,image video etc. Deeper and deeper layers are proposed with huge success with resnet structures having around 152 layers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Chinmay Rane , Kanishka Tyagi , Michael Manry

We propose two approaches of locally adaptive activation functions namely, layer-wise and neuron-wise locally adaptive activation functions, which improve the performance of deep and physics-informed neural networks. The local adaptation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Ameya D. Jagtap , Kenji Kawaguchi , George Em Karniadakis

Recent research has found that the activation function (AF) selected for adding non-linearity into the output can have a big impact on how effectively deep learning networks perform. Developing activation functions that can adapt…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Ashish Rajanand , Pradeep Singh

To enhance the nonlinearity of neural networks and increase their mapping abilities between the inputs and response variables, activation functions play a crucial role to model more complex relationships and patterns in the data. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Haigen Hu , Aizhu Liu , Qiu Guan , Xiaoxin Li , Shengyong Chen , Qianwei Zhou

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an attractive spatio-temporal computing paradigm for complex vision tasks. However, most existing works yield models that require many time steps and do not leverage the inherent temporal…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-10-25 Gourav Datta , Haoqin Deng , Robert Aviles , Peter A. Beerel