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Despite the unresolved 'dying ReLU problem', the classical ReLU activation function (AF) has been extensively applied in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), for image classification. The common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Stamatis Mastromichalakis

Activation functions play a decisive role in determining the capacity of Deep Neural Networks as they enable neural networks to capture inherent nonlinearities present in data fed to them. The prior research on activation functions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Faiza Makhdoom , Dianchen Lu

The training process of neural networks usually optimize weights and bias parameters of linear transformations, while nonlinear activation functions are pre-specified and fixed. This work develops a systematic approach to constructing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Zhengqi Liu , Shuhao Cao , Yuwen Li , Ludmil Zikatanov

Successive linear transforms followed by nonlinear "activation" functions can approximate nonlinear functions to arbitrary precision given sufficient layers. The number of necessary layers is dependent on, in part, by the nature of the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-09-26 Andrei Nicolae

Nonlinear activation functions are widely recognized for enhancing the expressivity of neural networks, which is the primary reason for their widespread implementation. In this work, we focus on ReLU activation and reveal a novel and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chaoyue Liu , Han Bi , Like Hui , Xiao Liu

In recent years, functional neural networks have been proposed and studied in order to approximate nonlinear continuous functionals defined on $L^p([-1, 1]^s)$ for integers $s\ge1$ and $1\le p<\infty$. However, their theoretical properties…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-04-11 Linhao Song , Jun Fan , Di-Rong Chen , Ding-Xuan Zhou

The choice of activation function plays a critical role in neural networks, yet most architectures still rely on fixed, uniform activation functions across all neurons. We introduce SmartMixed, a two-phase training strategy that allows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Amin Omidvar

Recently, much attention has been devoted to finding highly efficient and powerful activation functions for CNN layers. Because activation functions inject different nonlinearities between layers that affect performance, varying them is one…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-05 Loris Nanni , Gianluca Maguolo , Sheryl Brahnam , Michelangelo Paci

The paper briefy reviews several recent results on hierarchical architectures for learning from examples, that may formally explain the conditions under which Deep Convolutional Neural Networks perform much better in function approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-08-12 Hrushikesh Mhaskar , Tomaso Poggio

Activation functions play a pivotal role in the function learning using neural networks. The non-linearity in the learned function is achieved by repeated use of the activation function. Over the years, numerous activation functions have…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

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

Activation functions are critical components in deep neural networks, directly influencing gradient flow, training stability, and model performance. Traditional functions like ReLU suffer from dead neuron problems, while sigmoid and tanh…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sergii Kavun

An appropriate choice of the activation function (like ReLU, sigmoid or swish) plays an important role in the performance of (deep) multilayer perceptrons (MLP) for classification and regression learning. Prototype-based classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-21 Thomas Villmann , John Ravichandran , Andrea Villmann , David Nebel , Marika Kaden

Activation functions have a notorious impact on neural networks on both training and testing the models against the desired problem. Currently, the most used activation function is the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). This paper introduces a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-23 Eric Alcaide

Deep learning researchers have a keen interest in proposing two new novel activation functions which can boost network performance. A good choice of activation function can have significant consequences in improving network performance. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

Activation functions are essential for deep learning methods to learn and perform complex tasks such as image classification. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) has been widely used and become the default activation function across the deep…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Hock Hung Chieng , Noorhaniza Wahid , Pauline Ong , Sai Raj Kishore Perla

Rectified linear activation units are important components for state-of-the-art deep convolutional networks. In this paper, we propose a novel S-shaped rectified linear activation unit (SReLU) to learn both convex and non-convex functions,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2015-12-23 Xiaojie Jin , Chunyan Xu , Jiashi Feng , Yunchao Wei , Junjun Xiong , Shuicheng Yan

The performance of deep network learning strongly depends on the choice of the non-linear activation function associated with each neuron. However, deciding on the best activation is non-trivial, and the choice depends on the architecture,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-05 Alejandro Molina , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting

Activation functions (AFs), which are pivotal to the success (or failure) of a neural network, have received increased attention in recent years, with researchers seeking to design novel AFs that improve some aspect of network performance.…

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

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