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Related papers: Discovering Parametric Activation Functions

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Traditional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) typically use the same activation function (usually ReLU) for all neurons with non-linear mapping operations. For example, the deep convolutional architecture Inception-v4 uses ReLU. To…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-05-31 Luna M. Zhang

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

This paper proposes $\mathrm{dynActivation}$, a per-layer trainable activation defined as $f_i(x) = \mathrm{BaseAct}(x)(\alpha_i - \beta_i) + \beta_i x$, where $\alpha_i$ and $\beta_i$ are lightweight learned scalars that interpolate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alois Bachmann

Deep networks are gradually penetrating almost every domain in our lives due to their amazing success. However, with substantive performance accuracy improvements comes the price of \emph{irreproducibility}. Two identical models, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Gil I. Shamir , Dong Lin , Lorenzo Coviello

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

Nonlinear activation functions are pivotal to the success of deep neural nets, and choosing the appropriate activation function can significantly affect their performance. Most networks use fixed activation functions (e.g., ReLU, GELU,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Irit Chelly , Shahaf E. Finder , Shira Ifergane , Oren Freifeld

The activation function plays a crucial role in model optimisation, yet the optimal choice remains unclear. For example, the Sigmoid activation is the de-facto activation in balanced classification tasks, however, in imbalanced…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Konstantinos Panagiotis Alexandridis , Jiankang Deng , Anh Nguyen , Shan Luo

ReLU is widely seen as the default choice for activation functions in neural networks. However, there are cases where more complicated functions are required. In particular, recurrent neural networks (such as LSTMs) make extensive use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-20 Nicholas Gerard Timmons , Andrew Rice

Recent seminal work at the intersection of deep neural networks practice and random matrix theory has linked the convergence speed and robustness of these networks with the combination of random weight initialization and nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Pierre H. Richemond , Yike Guo

We present a simple, effective, and general activation function we term ACON which learns to activate the neurons or not. Interestingly, we find Swish, the recent popular NAS-searched activation, can be interpreted as a smooth approximation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-19 Ningning Ma , Xiangyu Zhang , Ming Liu , Jian Sun

We can compare the expressiveness of neural networks that use rectified linear units (ReLUs) by the number of linear regions, which reflect the number of pieces of the piecewise linear functions modeled by such networks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-17 Thiago Serra , Srikumar Ramalingam

Recently proposed neural network activation functions such as rectified linear, maxout, and local winner-take-all have allowed for faster and more effective training of deep neural architectures on large and complex datasets. The common…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-04-13 Rupesh Kumar Srivastava , Jonathan Masci , Faustino Gomez , Jürgen Schmidhuber

The success of deep networks has been attributed in part to their expressivity: per parameter, deep networks can approximate a richer class of functions than shallow networks. In ReLU networks, the number of activation patterns is one…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-10-22 Boris Hanin , David Rolnick

The un-rectifying technique expresses a non-linear point-wise activation function as a data-dependent variable, which means that the activation variable along with its input and output can all be employed in optimization. The ReLU network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-19 Wen-Liang Hwang , Shih-Shuo Tung

We describe an algorithm that learns two-layer residual units using rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation: suppose the input $\mathbf{x}$ is from a distribution with support space $\mathbb{R}^d$ and the ground-truth generative model is a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-13 Zhunxuan Wang , Linyun He , Chunchuan Lyu , Shay B. Cohen

We demonstrate that deep neural networks with the ReLU activation function can efficiently approximate the solutions of various types of parametric linear transport equations. For non-smooth initial conditions, the solutions of these PDEs…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2020-01-31 Fabian Laakmann , Philipp Petersen

We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Maosen Tang , Alex Townsend

Mean field theory has been successfully used to analyze deep neural networks (DNN) in the infinite size limit. Given the finite size of realistic DNN, we utilize the large deviation theory and path integral analysis to study the deviation…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2020-02-21 Bo Li , David Saad

This theoretical paper is devoted to developing a rigorous theory for demystifying the global convergence phenomenon in a challenging scenario: learning over-parameterized Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) nets for very high dimensional dataset…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Peng He

Recently, neural networks in machine learning use rectified linear units (ReLUs) in early processing layers for better performance. Training these structures sometimes results in "dying ReLU units" with near-zero outputs. We first explore…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-17 Scott C. Douglas , Jiutian Yu