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We propose $\textit{Mish}$, a novel self-regularized non-monotonic activation function which can be mathematically defined as: $f(x)=x\tanh(softplus(x))$. As activation functions play a crucial role in the performance and training dynamics…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-14 Diganta Misra

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

The most widely used activation functions in current deep feed-forward neural networks are rectified linear units (ReLU), and many alternatives have been successfully applied, as well. However, none of the alternatives have managed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-27 Leon René Sütfeld , Flemming Brieger , Holger Finger , Sonja Füllhase , Gordon Pipa

Rectified linear units (ReLU) are well-known to be helpful in obtaining faster convergence and thus higher performance for many deep-learning-based applications. However, networks with ReLU tend to perform poorly when the number of filter…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-12-14 Jae-Seok Choi , Munchurl Kim

Recent findings suggest that consecutive layers of neural networks with the ReLU activation function \emph{fold} the input space during the learning process. While many works hint at this phenomenon, an approach to quantify the folding was…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Michal Lewandowski , Bernhard Heinzl , Raphael Pisoni , Bernhard A. Moser

In this paper, a novel neural network activation function, called Symmetrical Gaussian Error Linear Unit (SGELU), is proposed to obtain high performance. It is achieved by effectively integrating the property of the stochastic regularizer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Chao Yu , Zhiguo Su

Deep neural networks, as a powerful system to represent high dimensional complex functions, play a key role in deep learning. Convergence of deep neural networks is a fundamental issue in building the mathematical foundation for deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Wentao Huang , Yuesheng Xu , Haizhang Zhang

Lipschitz-constrained neural networks have many applications in machine learning. Since designing and training expressive Lipschitz-constrained networks is very challenging, there is a need for improved methods and a better theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-14 Sebastian Neumayer , Alexis Goujon , Pakshal Bohra , Michael Unser

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

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mingi Kang , Zai Yang , Jeova Farias Sales Rocha Neto

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

The success of artificial neural networks (ANNs) hinges greatly on the judicious selection of an activation function, introducing non-linearity into network and enabling them to model sophisticated relationships in data. However, the search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Haoyuan Sun , Zihao Wu , Bo Xia , Pu Chang , Zibin Dong , Yifu Yuan , Yongzhe Chang , Xueqian Wang

We present a novel approach to implementing all-optical Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation functions using compact doubly-resonant cavities with dimensions of approximately $10\,\mu\mathrm{m}$. Our design leverages $\chi^{(2)}$…

Optics · Physics 2025-04-29 Amirreza Ahmadnejad , Mohmmad Mehrdad Asadi , Somayyeh Koohi

In this paper, we develop an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for deep neural networks training with sigmoid-type activation functions (called \textit{sigmoid-ADMM pair}), mainly motivated by the gradient-free nature of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-16 Jinshan Zeng , Shao-Bo Lin , Yuan Yao , Ding-Xuan Zhou

The design of activation functions remains a pivotal component in optimizing deep neural networks. While prevailing choices like Swish and GELU demonstrate considerable efficacy, they often exhibit domain-specific optima. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Gaurav Sarkar , Jay Gala , Subarna Tripathi

Many activation functions have been proposed in the past, but selecting an adequate one requires trial and error. We propose a new methodology of designing activation functions within a neural network at each layer. We call this technique…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-28 Mark Harmon , Diego Klabjan

We study the necessary and sufficient complexity of ReLU neural networks---in terms of depth and number of weights---which is required for approximating classifier functions in $L^2$. As a model class, we consider the set $\mathcal{E}^\beta…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2018-05-23 Philipp Petersen , Felix Voigtlaender

Amongst others, the adoption of Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) is regarded as one of the ingredients of the success of deep learning. ReLU activation has been shown to mitigate the vanishing gradient issue, to encourage sparsity in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Nicola Picchiotti , Marco Gori

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

We study approximation and statistical learning properties of deep ReLU networks under structural assumptions that mitigate the curse of dimensionality. We prove minimax-optimal uniform approximation rates for $s$-H\"older smooth functions…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2026-02-06 Thomas Nagler , Sophie Langer