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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

Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuhao Liu , Zilin Wang , Lei Wu , Shaobo Zhang

Selecting the most suitable activation function is a critical factor in the effectiveness of deep learning models, as it influences their learning capacity, stability, and computational efficiency. In recent years, the Gaussian Error Linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Minhyeok Lee

Recently, self-normalizing neural networks (SNNs) have been proposed with the intention to avoid batch or weight normalization. The key step in SNNs is to properly scale the exponential linear unit (referred to as SELU) to inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-30 G. Zhang , H. Li

Activation functions shape the outputs of artificial neurons and, therefore, are integral parts of neural networks in general and deep learning in particular. Some activation functions, such as logistic and relu, have been used for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Johannes Lederer

Activation functions have come up as one of the essential components of neural networks. The choice of adequate activation function can impact the accuracy of these methods. In this study, we experiment for finding an optimal activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Vipul Bansal

In the era of Deep Neural Network based solutions for a variety of real-life tasks, having a compact and energy-efficient deployable model has become fairly important. Most of the existing deep architectures use Rectifier Linear Unit (ReLU)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Nancy Nayak , Sheetal Kalyani

`Biologically inspired' activation functions, such as the logistic sigmoid, have been instrumental in the historical advancement of machine learning. However in the field of deep learning, they have been largely displaced by rectified…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Gardave S Bhumbra

Activation functions are critical to the performance of deep neural networks, particularly in domains such as functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), where nonlinearity, low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and signal variability poses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Behtom Adeli , John McLinden , Pankaj Pandey , Ming Shao , Yalda Shahriari

In this study, SoftReMish, a new activation function designed to improve the performance of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in image classification tasks, is proposed. Using the MNIST dataset, a standard CNN architecture consisting of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Mustafa Bayram Gücen

In this paper, we introduce the Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU), a novel neural network activation function, represented as $f(x) = x{\cdot}tanh(e^x)$. TeLU is designed to overcome the limitations of conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Alfredo Fernandez , Ankur Mali

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

Modeling sophisticated activation functions within deep learning architectures has evolved into a distinct research direction. Functions such as GELU, SELU, and SiLU offer smooth gradients and improved convergence properties, making them…

Deep learning at its core, contains functions that are composition of a linear transformation with a non-linear function known as activation function. In past few years, there is an increasing interest in construction of novel activation…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

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

Neural architectures tend to fit their data with relatively simple functions. This "simplicity bias" is widely regarded as key to their success. This paper explores the limits of this principle. Building on recent findings that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-14 Damien Teney , Liangze Jiang , Florin Gogianu , Ehsan Abbasnejad

Activation functions are fundamental elements of deep learning architectures as they significantly influence training dynamics. ReLU, while widely used, is prone to the dying neuron problem, which has been mitigated by variants such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Indrashis Das , Mahmoud Safari , Steven Adriaensen , Frank Hutter

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have garnered significant attention in various fields of science and technology in recent years. Activation functions define how neurons in DNNs process incoming signals for them. They are essential for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jianfei Li , Han Feng , Ding-Xuan Zhou

Batch Normalization (BN) is a cornerstone of deep learning, yet it fundamentally breaks down in micro-batch regimes (e.g., 3D medical imaging) and non-IID Federated Learning. Removing BN from deep architectures, however, often leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Suvinava Basak

Artificial neural networks usually consist of successive linear multiply-accumulate operations and nonlinear activation functions. However, most optical neural networks only achieve the linear operation in the optical domain, while the…

Optics · Physics 2023-11-03 Guanting Liu , Yiwei Shen , Ruiqian Li , Jingyi Yu , Xuming He , Cheng Wang