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The paper surveys recent progresses in understanding the dynamics and loss landscape of the gradient flow equations associated to deep linear neural networks, i.e., the gradient descent training dynamics (in the limit when the step size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Joel Wendin , Claudio Altafini

While the optimization problem behind deep neural networks is highly non-convex, it is frequently observed in practice that training deep networks seems possible without getting stuck in suboptimal points. It has been argued that this is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-06-14 Quynh Nguyen , Matthias Hein

We employ adaptive activation functions for regression in deep and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to approximate smooth and discontinuous functions as well as solutions of linear and nonlinear partial differential equations. In…

Computational Physics · Physics 2020-01-29 Ameya D. Jagtap , George Em Karniadakis

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

In this paper, we study the loss landscape of one-hidden-layer neural networks with ReLU-like activation functions trained with the empirical squared loss using gradient descent (GD). We identify the stationary points of such networks,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Frank Zhengqing Wu , Berfin Simsek , Francois Gaston Ged

We study the geometry of linear networks with one-dimensional convolutional layers. The function spaces of these networks can be identified with semi-algebraic families of polynomials admitting sparse factorizations. We analyze the impact…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-29 Kathlén Kohn , Guido Montúfar , Vahid Shahverdi , Matthew Trager

The effectiveness of deep neural architectures has been widely supported in terms of both experimental and foundational principles. There is also clear evidence that the activation function (e.g. the rectifier and the LSTM units) plays a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Giuseppe Marra , Dario Zanca , Alessandro Betti , Marco Gori

The expressive power of artificial neural networks crucially depends on the nonlinearity of their activation functions. Though a wide variety of nonlinear activation functions have been proposed for use in artificial neural networks, a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2021-02-24 Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Cengiz Pehlevan

Neural network training is usually accomplished by solving a non-convex optimization problem using stochastic gradient descent. Although one optimizes over the networks parameters, the main loss function generally only depends on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Julius Berner , Dennis Elbrächter , Philipp Grohs

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

Random feature model with a nonlinear activation function has been shown to perform asymptotically equivalent to a Gaussian model in terms of training and generalization errors. Analysis of the equivalent model reveals an important yet not…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-02 Samet Demir , Zafer Doğan

We introduce a new family of non-linear neural network activation functions that mimic the properties induced by the widely-used Mat\'ern family of kernels in Gaussian process (GP) models. This class spans a range of locally stationary…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Lassi Meronen , Christabella Irwanto , Arno Solin

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

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

The loss function used to train a neural network is strongly connected to its output layer from a statistical point of view. This technical report analyzes common activation functions for a neural network output layer, like linear, sigmoid,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Fernando Berzal

We study the optimization landscape and the stability properties of training problems with squared loss for neural networks and general nonlinear conic approximation schemes. It is demonstrated that, if a nonlinear conic approximation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-03 Constantin Christof

Neural network models are known to reinforce hidden data biases, making them unreliable and difficult to interpret. We seek to build models that `know what they do not know' by introducing inductive biases in the function space. We show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Lassi Meronen , Martin Trapp , Arno Solin

Conventional research attributes the improvements of generalization ability of deep neural networks either to powerful optimizers or the new network design. Different from them, in this paper, we aim to link the generalization ability of a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-06 Hui-Ling Zhen , Xi Lin , Alan Z. Tang , Zhenhua Li , Qingfu Zhang , Sam Kwong

We perform an empirical study of the behaviour of deep networks when fully linearizing some of its feature channels through a sparsity prior on the overall number of nonlinear units in the network. In experiments on image classification and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Christian H. X. Ali Mehmeti-Göpel , Jan Disselhoff

Despite their practical success, a theoretical understanding of the loss landscape of neural networks has proven challenging due to the high-dimensional, non-convex, and highly nonlinear structure of such models. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Abbas Kazemipour , Brett W. Larsen , Shaul Druckmann