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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

Feed-forward networks can be interpreted as mappings with linear decision surfaces at the level of the last layer. We investigate how the tangent space of the network can be exploited to refine the decision in case of ReLU (Rectified Linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Dániel Rácz , Bálint Daróczy

This paper analyzes representations of continuous piecewise linear functions with infinite width, finite cost shallow neural networks using the rectified linear unit (ReLU) as an activation function. Through its integral representation, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Sarah McCarty

Today, it is more important than ever before for users to have trust in the models they use. As Machine Learning models fall under increased regulatory scrutiny and begin to see more applications in high-stakes situations, it becomes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-03 William Knauth

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

Despite their widespread success, deep neural networks remain critically vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant risks in safety-sensitive applications. This paper investigates activation functions as a crucial yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yunrui Yu , Kafeng Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

We can compress a rectifier network while exactly preserving its underlying functionality with respect to a given input domain if some of its neurons are stable. However, current approaches to determine the stability of neurons with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Thiago Serra , Xin Yu , Abhinav Kumar , Srikumar Ramalingam

Understanding the learning dynamics and inductive bias of neural networks (NNs) is hindered by the opacity of the relationship between NN parameters and the function represented. We propose reparametrizing ReLU NNs as continuous piecewise…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-06 Justin Sahs , Ryan Pyle , Aneel Damaraju , Josue Ortega Caro , Onur Tavaslioglu , Andy Lu , Ankit Patel

Rectified Linear Units (ReLU) have become the main model for the neural units in current deep learning systems. This choice has been originally suggested as a way to compensate for the so called vanishing gradient problem which can undercut…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2024-05-06 Carlo Baldassi , Enrico M. Malatesta , Riccardo Zecchina

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

Large number of ReLU and MAC operations of Deep neural networks make them ill-suited for latency and compute-efficient private inference. In this paper, we present a model optimization method that allows a model to learn to be shallow. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Souvik Kundu , Yuke Zhang , Dake Chen , Peter A. Beerel

Despite their prevalence in neural networks we still lack a thorough theoretical characterization of ReLU layers. This paper aims to further our understanding of ReLU layers by studying how the activation function ReLU interacts with the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-13 Sören Dittmer , Emily J. King , Peter Maass

We consider the computational complexity of training depth-2 neural networks composed of rectified linear units (ReLUs). We show that, even for the case of a single ReLU, finding a set of weights that minimizes the squared error (even…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2018-10-17 Pasin Manurangsi , Daniel Reichman

Whereas recovery of the manifold from data is a well-studied topic, approximation rates for functions defined on manifolds are less known. In this work, we study a regression problem with inputs on a $d^*$-dimensional manifold that is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-08-05 Johannes Schmidt-Hieber

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

This document proposes a parametric activation function (ac.f.) aimed at improving multidimensional nonlinear data regression. It is a established knowledge that nonlinear ac.f's are required for learning nonlinear datasets. This work shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Enda D. V. Bigarella

Even in recent neural network architectures such as Transformers and Extended LSTM (xLSTM), and traditional ones like Convolutional Neural Networks, Activation Functions are an integral part of nearly all neural networks. They enable more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Matias Roodschild , Jorge Gotay-Sardiñas , Victor A. Jimenez , Adrian Will

We present an ideal mixed-integer programming (MIP) formulation for a rectified linear unit (ReLU) appearing in a trained neural network. Our formulation requires a single binary variable and no additional continuous variables beyond the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-04 Ross Anderson , Joey Huchette , Christian Tjandraatmadja , Juan Pablo Vielma

We present a greedy-based approach to construct an efficient single hidden layer neural network with the ReLU activation that approximates a target function. In our approach we obtain a shallow network by utilizing a greedy algorithm with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Anton Dereventsov , Armenak Petrosyan , Clayton Webster

The dominant paradigm in modern neural networks relies on simple, monotonically-increasing activation functions like ReLU. While effective, this paradigm necessitates large, massively-parameterized models to approximate complex functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Shiko Kudo