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The widespread use of Multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) often relies on a fixed activation function (e.g., ReLU, Sigmoid, Tanh) for all nodes within the hidden layers. While effective in many scenarios, this uniformity may limit the networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Hy Nguyen , Duy Khoa Pham , Srikanth Thudumu , Hung Du , Rajesh Vasa , Kon Mouzakis

The stunning empirical successes of neural networks currently lack rigorous theoretical explanation. What form would such an explanation take, in the face of existing complexity-theoretic lower bounds? A first step might be to show that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-07-18 Le Song , Santosh Vempala , John Wilmes , Bo Xie

Activation functions play critical roles in neural networks, yet current off-the-shelf neural networks pay little attention to the specific choice of activation functions used. Here we show that data-aware customization of activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-18 Fuchang Gao , Boyu Zhang

Elements of neural networks, both biological and artificial, can be described by their selectivity for specific cognitive features. Understanding these features is important for understanding the inner workings of neural networks. For a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Nikita Pospelov , Andrei Chertkov , Maxim Beketov , Ivan Oseledets , Konstantin Anokhin

The activation function deployed in a deep neural network has great influence on the performance of the network at initialisation, which in turn has implications for training. In this paper we study how to avoid two problems at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Michael Murray , Vinayak Abrol , Jared Tanner

We prove some new results concerning the approximation rate of neural networks with general activation functions. Our first result concerns the rate of approximation of a two layer neural network with a polynomially-decaying non-sigmoidal…

Classical Analysis and ODEs · Mathematics 2021-01-05 Jonathan W. Siegel , Jinchao Xu

A novel model called error loss network (ELN) is proposed to build an error loss function for supervised learning. The ELN is in structure similar to a radial basis function (RBF) neural network, but its input is an error sample and output…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Badong Chen , Yunfei Zheng , Pengju Ren

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) with leaky integrate and fire (LIF) neurons, can be operated in an event-driven manner and have internal states to retain information over time, providing opportunities for energy-efficient neuromorphic…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Wachirawit Ponghiran , Kaushik Roy

Deep learning researchers have a keen interest in proposing two new novel activation functions which can boost network performance. A good choice of activation function can have significant consequences in improving network performance. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) that operate in an event-driven manner and employ binary spike representation have recently emerged as promising candidates for energy-efficient computing. However, a cost bottleneck arises in obtaining…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-01-22 Yunpeng Yao , Man Wu , Zheng Chen , Renyuan Zhang

We provide an overview of several non-linear activation functions in a neural network architecture that have proven successful in many machine learning applications. We conduct an empirical analysis on the effectiveness of using these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Giovanni Alcantara

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

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

Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Longqing Ye

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) are known to suffer from optimization difficulty. In this work, we reveal the connection between the optimization difficulty of PINNs and activation functions. Specifically, we show that PINNs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-27 Honghui Wang , Lu Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

Inspired by the human brain's ability to adapt to new tasks without erasing prior knowledge, we develop spiking neural networks (SNNs) with dynamic structures for Class Incremental Learning (CIL). Our comparative experiments reveal that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Wenyao Ni , Jiangrong Shen , Qi Xu , Huajin Tang

This is paper for the smooth function approximation by neural networks (NN). Mathematical or physical functions can be replaced by NN models through regression. In this study, we get NNs that generate highly accurate and highly smooth…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-01-03 I. K. Hong

Activation sparsity is an intriguing property of deep neural networks that has been extensively studied in ReLU-based models, due to its advantages for efficiency, robustness, and interpretability. However, methods relying on exact zero…

The impressive expressive power of deep neural networks (DNNs) underlies their widespread applicability. However, while the theoretical capacity of deep architectures is high, the practical expressive power achieved through successful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-21 Zezhong Zhang , Feng Bao , Guannan Zhang

The choice of activation functions is crucial for modern deep neural networks. Popular hand-designed activation functions like Rectified Linear Unit(ReLU) and its variants show promising performance in various tasks and models. Swish, the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yucong Zhou , Zezhou Zhu , Zhao Zhong