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Related papers: Transformers with Learnable Activation Functions

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Inspired by biological neurons, the activation functions play an essential part in the learning process of any artificial neural network commonly used in many real-world problems. Various activation functions have been proposed in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Ameya D. Jagtap , George Em Karniadakis

Traditional approaches in offline reinforcement learning aim to learn the optimal policy that maximizes the cumulative reward, also known as return. It is increasingly important to adjust the performance of AI agents to meet human…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tsunehiko Tanaka , Kenshi Abe , Kaito Ariu , Tetsuro Morimura , Edgar Simo-Serra

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving robotic manipulation tasks. However, it is challenging to apply the RL algorithms directly in the real world. For one thing, RL is data-intensive and typically requires…

How do we transfer the relevant knowledge from ever larger foundation models into small, task-specific downstream models that can run at much lower costs? Standard transfer learning using pre-trained weights as the initialization transfers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Shikai Qiu , Boran Han , Danielle C. Maddix , Shuai Zhang , Yuyang Wang , Andrew Gordon Wilson

Though the transformer architectures have shown dominance in many natural language understanding tasks, there are still unsolved issues for the training of transformer models, especially the need for a principled way of warm-up which has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Wei Zhu , Xiaoling Wang , Xipeng Qiu , Yuan Ni , Guotong Xie

While modern LLMs are aligned to refuse harmful requests, it is essential to understand the underlying mechanistic basis of this refusal behavior for model safety analysis. For example, steering-based jailbreak attacks exploit this by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Su-Hyeon Kim , Hyundong Jin , Yejin Lee , Yo-Sub Han

The Transformer architecture deeply changed the natural language processing, outperforming all previous state-of-the-art models. However, well-known Transformer models like BERT, RoBERTa, and GPT-2 require a huge compute budget to create a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-21 Luca Di Liello , Matteo Gabburo , Alessandro Moschitti

Success of deep neural networks in diverse tasks across domains of computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing, has necessitated understanding the dynamics of training process and also working of trained models. Two…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-09-06 Yogesh Kochar , Sunil Kumar Vengalil , Neelam Sinha

Existing parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods primarily adapt weight matrices while keeping activation functions fixed. We introduce \textbf{NoRA}, the first PEFT framework that directly adapts nonlinear activation functions in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Bo Yin , Xingyi Yang , Xinchao Wang

Initially introduced as a machine translation model, the Transformer architecture has now become the foundation for modern deep learning architecture, with applications in a wide range of fields, from computer vision to natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Martin Courtois , Malte Ostendorff , Leonhard Hennig , Georg Rehm

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

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

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been widely applied to dynamic routing, modulation and spectrum assignment (RMSA) in optical networks, yet no prior work has trained a transformer model for this task. We attribute this to the high data and…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Michael Doherty , Alejandra Beghelli , Laura Toni

Deep neural networks are known to be vulnerable to adversarially perturbed inputs. A commonly used defense is adversarial training, whose performance is influenced by model capacity. While previous works have studied the impact of varying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Sihui Dai , Saeed Mahloujifar , Prateek Mittal

Recent work has shown that language models' refusal behavior is primarily encoded in a single direction in their latent space, making it vulnerable to targeted attacks. Although Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) attempts to improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Alexandra Abbas , Nora Petrova , Helios Ael Lyons , Natalia Perez-Campanero

How does language model pretraining help transfer learning? We consider a simple ablation technique for determining the impact of each pretrained layer on transfer task performance. This method, partial reinitialization, involves replacing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-11 Alex Tamkin , Trisha Singh , Davide Giovanardi , Noah Goodman

Trainable activation functions, whose parameters are optimized alongside network weights, offer increased expressivity compared to fixed activation functions. Specifically, trainable activation functions defined as ratios of polynomials…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Rafał Surdej , Michał Bortkiewicz , Alex Lewandowski , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Clare Lyle

Despite massive investments in scale, deep models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction often exhibit rapidly diminishing returns - a stark contrast to the smooth, predictable gains seen in large language models. We identify the root…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Bencheng Yan , Yuejie Lei , Zhiyuan Zeng , Di Wang , Kaiyi Lin , Pengjie Wang , Jian Xu , Bo Zheng

In robot learning, Vision Transformers (ViTs) are standard for visual perception, yet most methods discard valuable information by using only the final layer's features. We argue this provides an insufficient representation and propose the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Wenhao Li , Chengwei Ma , Weixin Mao

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims to mitigate performance degradation under distribution shifts by updating model parameters during inference. Existing approaches have primarily framed adaptation around affine modulation, focusing on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Hyeongyu Kim , Geonhui Han , Dosik Hwang