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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 analyze a simple one-hidden-layer neural network with ReLU activation functions and fixed biases, with one-dimensional input and output. We study both continuous and discrete versions of the model, and we rigorously prove the convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Fabricio Macià , Shu Nakamura

Effective activation functions introduce non-linear transformations, providing neural networks with stronger fitting capa-bilities, which help them better adapt to real data distributions. Huawei Noah's Lab believes that dynamic activation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Chuan Feng , Xi Lin , Shiping Zhu , Hongkang Shi , Maojie Tang , Hua Huang

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

Activation functions play a vital role in the training of Convolutional Neural Networks. For this reason, to develop efficient and performing functions is a crucial problem in the deep learning community. Key to these approaches is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Gianluca Maguolo , Loris Nanni , Stefano Ghidoni

In this paper, we explore the concept of adding learn-able slope and mean shift parameters to an activation function to improve the total response region. The characteristics of an activation function depend highly on the value of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-12-24 S. Balaji , T. Kavya , Natasha Sebastian

Deep neural network (DNN) typically involves convolutions, pooling, and activation function. Due to the growing concern about privacy, privacy-preserving DNN becomes a hot research topic. Generally, the convolution and pooling operations…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-04 Qian Feng , Zhihua Xia , Zhifeng Xu , Jiasi Weng , Jian Weng

Activation functions can have a significant impact on reducing the topological complexity of input data and therefore improve the performance of the model. Selecting a suitable activation function is an essential step in neural model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-15 Haishuo Fang , Ji-Ung Lee , Nafise Sadat Moosavi , Iryna Gurevych

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

Artificial neural networks typically have a fixed, non-linear activation function at each neuron. We have designed a novel form of piecewise linear activation function that is learned independently for each neuron using gradient descent.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Forest Agostinelli , Matthew Hoffman , Peter Sadowski , Pierre Baldi

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

In recent years novel activation functions have been proposed to improve the performance of neural networks, and they show superior performance compared to the ReLU counterpart. However, there are environments, where the availability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-29 Ákos Utasi

Activation functions (AFs) play a pivotal role in the performance of neural networks. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is currently the most commonly used AF. Several replacements to ReLU have been suggested but improvements have proven…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Raz Lapid , Moshe Sipper

Exploiting activation sparsity is a promising approach to significantly accelerating the inference process of large language models (LLMs) without compromising performance. However, activation sparsity is determined by activation functions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Yixin Song , Haotong Xie , Zhengyan Zhang , Bo Wen , Li Ma , Zeyu Mi , Haibo Chen

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

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved unprecedented performance in many low-level vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art results are typically achieved by very deep networks, which can reach tens of layers with tens of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Idan Kligvasser , Tamar Rott Shaham , Tomer Michaeli

Despite broad interest in applying deep learning techniques to scientific discovery, learning interpretable formulas that accurately describe scientific data is very challenging because of the vast landscape of possible functions and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-17 Fuchang Gao , Boyu Zhang

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

Activation function has a significant impact on the dynamics, convergence, and performance of deep neural networks. The search for a consistent and high-performing activation function has always been a pursuit during deep learning model…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Abdur Rahman , Lu He , Haifeng Wang

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