English
Related papers

Related papers: Activate or Not: Learning Customized Activation

200 papers

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 performance of artificial neural networks (ANNs) is influenced by weight initialization, the nature of activation functions, and their architecture. There is a wide range of activation functions that are traditionally used to train a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-11-30 Saeid Safaei , Vahid Safaei , Solmazi Safaei , Zerotti Woods , Hamid R. Arabnia , Juan B. Gutierrez

The simulation of human neurons and neurotransmission mechanisms has been realized in deep neural networks based on the theoretical implementations of activation functions. However, recent studies have reported that the threshold potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-11 Kyungsu Lee , Jaeseung Yang , Haeyun Lee , Jae Youn Hwang

Activation functions are non-linearities in neural networks that allow them to learn complex mapping between inputs and outputs. Typical choices for activation functions are ReLU, Tanh, Sigmoid etc., where the choice generally depends on…

In the last decade, an active area of research has been devoted to design novel activation functions that are able to help deep neural networks to converge, obtaining better performance. The training procedure of these architectures usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-26 Franco Manessi , Alessandro Rozza

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Alberto Marchisio , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Semeen Rehman , Maurizio Martina , Muhammad Shafique

We propose $\textit{Mish}$, a novel self-regularized non-monotonic activation function which can be mathematically defined as: $f(x)=x\tanh(softplus(x))$. As activation functions play a crucial role in the performance and training dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Diganta Misra

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

The choice of activation function in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. At present, the most effective and widely-used activation function is ReLU. However, because of the non-zero mean,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Yuan Zhou , Dandan Li , Shuwei Huo , Sun-Yuan Kung

Activation functions in neural networks are typically selected from a set of empirically validated, commonly used static functions such as ReLU, tanh, or sigmoid. However, by optimizing the shapes of a network's activation functions, we can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 William H Patty

This paper introduces a significantly better class of activation functions than the almost universally used ReLU like and Sigmoidal class of activation functions. Two new activation functions referred to as the Cone and Parabolic-Cone that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-05-08 Mathew Mithra Noel , Yug Oswal

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

Learning automatically the best activation function for the task is an active topic in neural network research. At the moment, despite promising results, it is still difficult to determine a method for learning an activation function that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Andrea Apicella , Francesco Isgrò , Roberto Prevete

An activation function has a significant impact on the efficiency and robustness of the neural networks. As an alternative, we evolved a cutting-edge non-monotonic activation function, Negative Stimulated Hybrid Activation Function (Nish).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Yildiray Anagun , Sahin Isik

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

The design of a neural network is usually carried out by defining the number of layers, the number of neurons per layer, their connections or synapses, and the activation function that they will execute. The training process tries to…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-07-01 Juan Heredia-Juesas , José Á. Martínez-Lorenzo

The weight initialization and the activation function of deep neural networks have a crucial impact on the performance of the training procedure. An inappropriate selection can lead to the loss of information of the input during forward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-10-09 Soufiane Hayou , Arnaud Doucet , Judith Rousseau

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

A wide variety of activation functions have been proposed for neural networks. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is especially popular today. There are many practical reasons that motivate the use of the ReLU. This paper provides new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Rahul Parhi , Robert D. Nowak

In this work, we propose activation functions for neuronal networks that are refinable and sum the identity. This new class of activation functions allows the insertion of new layers between existing ones and/or the increase of neurons in a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-05-07 Sergio López-Ureña