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Previous literature offers limited clues on how to learn a periodic function using modern neural networks. We start with a study of the extrapolation properties of neural networks; we prove and demonstrate experimentally that the standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Liu Ziyin , Tilman Hartwig , Masahito Ueda

The activation function plays a crucial role in model optimisation, yet the optimal choice remains unclear. For example, the Sigmoid activation is the de-facto activation in balanced classification tasks, however, in imbalanced…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Konstantinos Panagiotis Alexandridis , Jiankang Deng , Anh Nguyen , Shan Luo

We propose ReDense as a simple and low complexity way to improve the performance of trained neural networks. We use a combination of random weights and rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function to add a ReLU dense (ReDense) layer to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Alireza M. Javid , Sandipan Das , Mikael Skoglund , Saikat Chatterjee

While it is well-known that neural networks enjoy excellent approximation capabilities, it remains a big challenge to compute such approximations from point samples. Based on tools from Information-based complexity, recent work by Grohs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Ahmed Abdeljawad , Philipp Grohs

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

We consider functions from the real numbers to the real numbers, output by a neural network with 1 hidden activation layer, arbitrary width, and ReLU activation function. We assume that the parameters of the neural network are chosen…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 David Holmes

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 activation function deployed in a deep neural network has great influence on the performance of the network at initialisation, which in turn has implications for training. In this paper we study how to avoid two problems at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-18 Michael Murray , Vinayak Abrol , Jared Tanner

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

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

An example of an activation function $\sigma$ is given such that networks with activations $\{\sigma, \lfloor\cdot\rfloor\}$, integer weights and a fixed architecture depending on $d$ approximate continuous functions on $[0,1]^d$. The range…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-01 Aleksandr Beknazaryan

Spintronic technology is emerging as a direction for the hardware implementation of neurons and synapses of neuromorphic architectures. In particular, a single spintronic device can be used to implement the nonlinear activation function of…

Activation functions are key to effective backpropagation and expressiveness in deep neural networks. This work introduces Tangma, a new activation function that combines the smooth shape of the hyperbolic tangent with two learnable…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Shreel Golwala

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

Convex functions and their gradients play a critical role in mathematical imaging, from proximal optimization to Optimal Transport. The successes of deep learning has led many to use learning-based methods, where fixed functions or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-09 Anne Gagneux , Mathurin Massias , Emmanuel Soubies , Rémi Gribonval

Fourier Analysis Network (FAN) was recently proposed as a simple way to improve neural network performance by replacing part of Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activations with sine and cosine functions. Although several studies have reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Sam Jeong , Hae Yong Kim

Deep networks are gradually penetrating almost every domain in our lives due to their amazing success. However, with substantive performance accuracy improvements comes the price of \emph{irreproducibility}. Two identical models, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Gil I. Shamir , Dong Lin , Lorenzo Coviello

In recent years, neural networks have enjoyed a renaissance as function approximators in reinforcement learning. Two decades after Tesauro's TD-Gammon achieved near top-level human performance in backgammon, the deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-03 Stefan Elfwing , Eiji Uchibe , Kenji Doya

Overwhelming theoretical and empirical evidence shows that mildly overparametrized neural networks -- those with more connections than the size of the training data -- are often able to memorize the training data with $100\%$ accuracy. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-04 Roman Vershynin

A simple approach is proposed to obtain complexity controls for neural networks with general activation functions. The approach is motivated by approximating the general activation functions with one-dimensional ReLU networks, which reduces…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Zhong Li , Chao Ma , Lei Wu