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To enhance the nonlinearity of neural networks and increase their mapping abilities between the inputs and response variables, activation functions play a crucial role to model more complex relationships and patterns in the data. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Haigen Hu , Aizhu Liu , Qiu Guan , Xiaoxin Li , Shengyong Chen , Qianwei Zhou

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

Current research suggests that the key factors in designing neural network architectures involve choosing number of filters for every convolution layer, number of hidden neurons for every fully connected layer, dropout and pruning. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-17 Himanshu Pradeep Aswani , Amit Sethi

Recent studies have shown that the choice of activation function can significantly affect the performance of deep learning networks. However, the benefits of novel activation functions have been inconsistent and task dependent, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Garrett Bingham , Risto Miikkulainen

Activation Functions introduce non-linearity in the deep neural networks. This nonlinearity helps the neural networks learn faster and efficiently from the dataset. In deep learning, many activation functions are developed and used based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Ravin Kumar

This paper explores the expressive power of deep neural networks for a diverse range of activation functions. An activation function set $\mathscr{A}$ is defined to encompass the majority of commonly used activation functions, such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-28 Shijun Zhang , Jianfeng Lu , Hongkai Zhao

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

Activation in deep neural networks is fundamental to achieving non-linear mappings. Traditional studies mainly focus on finding fixed activations for a particular set of learning tasks or model architectures. The research on flexible…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Renlong Jie , Junbin Gao , Andrey Vasnev , Min-ngoc Tran

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

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

`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

The application of the deep learning model in classification plays an important role in the accurate detection of the target objects. However, the accuracy is affected by the activation function in the hidden and output layer. In this…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Md. Mehedi Hasan , Md. Ali Hossain , Azmain Yakin Srizon , Abu Sayeed

Activation functions play a key role in providing remarkable performance in deep neural networks, and the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is one of the most widely used activation functions. Various new activation functions and improvements on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Yang Liu , Jianpeng Zhang , Chao Gao , Jinghua Qu , Lixin Ji

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

ReLU, a commonly used activation function in deep neural networks, is prone to the issue of "Dying ReLU". Several enhanced versions, such as ELU, SeLU, and Swish, have been introduced and are considered to be less commonly utilized.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Rubiqa Zulfiqar , Asad Khan , Nimra

The loss function used to train a neural network is strongly connected to its output layer from a statistical point of view. This technical report analyzes common activation functions for a neural network output layer, like linear, sigmoid,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Fernando Berzal

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

There has been a growing interest in expressivity of deep neural networks. However, most of the existing work about this topic focuses only on the specific activation function such as ReLU or sigmoid. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-24 Ilsang Ohn , Yongdai Kim

We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

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