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Related papers: Approximating Activation Functions

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Recent studies have shown that the choice of activation function can significantly affect the performance of deep learning networks. However, the benefits of novel activation functions have been inconsistent and task dependent, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Garrett Bingham , Risto Miikkulainen

Successive linear transforms followed by nonlinear "activation" functions can approximate nonlinear functions to arbitrary precision given sufficient layers. The number of necessary layers is dependent on, in part, by the nature of the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-09-26 Andrei Nicolae

In this paper, we have extended the well-established universal approximator theory to neural networks that use the unbounded ReLU activation function and a nonlinear softmax output layer. We have proved that a sufficiently large neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-12 Behnam Asadi , Hui Jiang

Classical results in neural network approximation theory show how arbitrary continuous functions can be approximated by networks with a single hidden layer, under mild assumptions on the activation function. However, the classical theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-06 Tyler Lekang , Andrew Lamperski

We discuss the expressive power of neural networks which use the non-smooth ReLU activation function $\varrho(x) = \max\{0,x\}$ by analyzing the approximation theoretic properties of such networks. The existing results mainly fall into two…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2019-04-10 Felix Voigtlaender , Philipp Petersen

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

We consider approximations of general continuous functions on finite-dimensional cubes by general deep ReLU neural networks and study the approximation rates with respect to the modulus of continuity of the function and the total number of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Dmitry Yarotsky

The paper briefy reviews several recent results on hierarchical architectures for learning from examples, that may formally explain the conditions under which Deep Convolutional Neural Networks perform much better in function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Hrushikesh Mhaskar , Tomaso Poggio

It is well-known that overparametrized neural networks trained using gradient-based methods quickly achieve small training error with appropriate hyperparameter settings. Recent papers have proved this statement theoretically for highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Abhishek Panigrahi , Abhishek Shetty , Navin Goyal

We study the expressive power of deep ReLU neural networks for approximating functions in dilated shift-invariant spaces, which are widely used in signal processing, image processing, communications and so on. Approximation error bounds are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-05 Yunfei Yang , Zhen Li , Yang Wang

We study the approximation capacity of some variation spaces corresponding to shallow ReLU$^k$ neural networks. It is shown that sufficiently smooth functions are contained in these spaces with finite variation norms. For functions with…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-06-05 Yunfei Yang , Ding-Xuan Zhou

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

We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

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

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

It is often useful to compactly summarize important properties of model parameters and training data so that they can be used later without storing and/or iterating over the entire dataset. As a specific case, we consider estimating the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Nikita Dhawan , Sicong Huang , Juhan Bae , Roger Grosse

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

The scope of research in the domain of activation functions remains limited and centered around improving the ease of optimization or generalization quality of neural networks (NNs). However, to develop a deeper understanding of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Mohit Goyal , Rajan Goyal , Brejesh Lall

The success of artificial neural networks (ANNs) hinges greatly on the judicious selection of an activation function, introducing non-linearity into network and enabling them to model sophisticated relationships in data. However, the search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Haoyuan Sun , Zihao Wu , Bo Xia , Pu Chang , Zibin Dong , Yifu Yuan , Yongzhe Chang , Xueqian Wang

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