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Achieving transparency in black-box deep learning algorithms is still an open challenge. High dimensional features and decisions given by deep neural networks (NN) require new algorithms and methods to expose its mechanisms. Current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-12 Schyler C. Sun , Chen Li , Zhuangkun Wei , Antonios Tsourdos , Weisi Guo

Learning automatically the best activation function for the task is an active topic in neural network research. At the moment, despite promising results, it is still difficult to determine a method for learning an activation function that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Andrea Apicella , Francesco Isgrò , Roberto Prevete

Catastrophic forgetting has remained a significant challenge for efficient reinforcement learning for decades (Ring 1994, Rivest and Precup 2003). While recent works have proposed effective methods to mitigate this issue, they mainly focus…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Qingfeng Lan , Gautham Vasan , A. Rupam Mahmood

Catastrophic forgetting remains a significant challenge to continual learning for decades. While recent works have proposed effective methods to mitigate this problem, they mainly focus on the algorithmic side. Meanwhile, we do not fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Qingfeng Lan , A. Rupam Mahmood

Carefully designed activation functions can improve the performance of neural networks in many machine learning tasks. However, it is difficult for humans to construct optimal activation functions, and current activation function search…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-10 Garrett Bingham , Risto Miikkulainen

Despite considerable theoretical progress in the training of neural networks viewed as a multi-agent system of neurons, particularly concerning biological plausibility and decentralized training, their applicability to real-world problems…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Arshia Soltani Moakhar , Mohammad Azizmalayeri , Hossein Mirzaei , Mohammad Taghi Manzuri , Mohammad Hossein Rohban

This work presents an adaptive activation method for neural networks that exploits the interdependency of features. Each pixel, node, and layer is assigned with a polynomial activation function, whose coefficients are provided by an…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-11-22 Jinhyeok Jang , Jaehong Kim , Jaeyeon Lee , Seungjoon Yang

Memory footprint is one of the main limiting factors for large neural network training. In backpropagation, one needs to store the input to each operation in the computational graph. Every modern neural network model has quite a few…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-04 Georgii Novikov , Daniel Bershatsky , Julia Gusak , Alex Shonenkov , Denis Dimitrov , Ivan Oseledets

Activation functions play a vital role in the training of Convolutional Neural Networks. For this reason, to develop efficient and performing functions is a crucial problem in the deep learning community. Key to these approaches is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Gianluca Maguolo , Loris Nanni , Stefano Ghidoni

Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuhao Liu , Zilin Wang , Lei Wu , Shaobo Zhang

We are interested in assessing the use of neural networks as surrogate models to approximate and minimize objective functions in optimization problems. While neural networks are widely used for machine learning tasks such as classification…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-22 Tommaso Giovannelli , Oumaima Sohab , Luis Nunes Vicente

Learning in the presence of missing data can result in biased predictions and poor generalizability, among other difficulties, which data imputation methods only partially address. In neural networks, activation functions significantly…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Naeem Shahabi Sani , Ferial Najiantabriz , Shayan Shafaei , Dean F. Hougen

We consider artificial neurons which will update their weight coefficients with an internal rule based on backpropagation, rather than using it as an external training procedure. To achieve this we include the backpropagation error estimate…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-08-07 M. N. Nazarov

Automated machine learning (AutoML) methods improve upon existing models by optimizing various aspects of their design. While present methods focus on hyperparameters and neural network topologies, other aspects of neural network design can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-10 Garrett Bingham

Activation functions play a critical role in the performance and behaviour of neural networks, significantly impacting their ability to learn and generalise. Traditional activation functions, such as ReLU, sigmoid, and tanh, have been…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Benjamin David Winter , William John Teahan

In this paper, we propose novel quaternion activation functions where we modify either the quaternion magnitude or the phase, as an alternative to the commonly used split activation functions. We define criteria that are relevant for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Johannes Pöppelbaum , Andreas Schwung

Common nonlinear activation functions used in neural networks can cause training difficulties due to the saturation behavior of the activation function, which may hide dependencies that are not visible to vanilla-SGD (using first order…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-05 Caglar Gulcehre , Marcin Moczulski , Misha Denil , Yoshua Bengio

Despite their widespread success, the application of deep neural networks to functional data remains scarce today. The infinite dimensionality of functional data means standard learning algorithms can be applied only after appropriate…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-06-22 Junwen Yao , Jonas Mueller , Jane-Ling Wang

Optimization of neural network (NN) significantly influenced by the transfer function used in its active nodes. It has been observed that the homogeneity in the activation nodes does not provide the best solution. Therefore, the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-07-07 Varun Kumar Ojha , Ajith Abraham , Vaclav Snasel

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