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Activation functions shape the outputs of artificial neurons and, therefore, are integral parts of neural networks in general and deep learning in particular. Some activation functions, such as logistic and relu, have been used for many…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-01-26 Johannes Lederer

In contemporary large language models (LLMs), the swish-gated linear unit (SwiGLU) activation function is widely adopted to regulate the information flow and introduce non-linearity. For large positive inputs, SwiGLU approximates the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Peijie Jiang , Yuqi Feng , Cunyin Peng , Qian Zhao , Jia Liu , KunLong Chen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

Selecting the most suitable activation function is a critical factor in the effectiveness of deep learning models, as it influences their learning capacity, stability, and computational efficiency. In recent years, the Gaussian Error Linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Minhyeok Lee

Sparse computation offers a compelling solution for the inference of Large Language Models (LLMs) in low-resource scenarios by dynamically skipping the computation of inactive neurons. While traditional approaches focus on ReLU-based LLMs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhengyan Zhang , Yixin Song , Guanghui Yu , Xu Han , Yankai Lin , Chaojun Xiao , Chenyang Song , Zhiyuan Liu , Zeyu Mi , Maosong Sun

Activation in deep neural networks is fundamental to achieving non-linear mappings. Traditional studies mainly focus on finding fixed activations for a particular set of learning tasks or model architectures. The research on flexible…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-20 Renlong Jie , Junbin Gao , Andrey Vasnev , Min-ngoc Tran

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

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

We consider neural networks with rational activation functions. The choice of the nonlinear activation function in deep learning architectures is crucial and heavily impacts the performance of a neural network. We establish optimal bounds…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-10-01 Nicolas Boullé , Yuji Nakatsukasa , Alex Townsend

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

Batch Normalization (BN) is a cornerstone of deep learning, yet it fundamentally breaks down in micro-batch regimes (e.g., 3D medical imaging) and non-IID Federated Learning. Removing BN from deep architectures, however, often leads to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Suvinava Basak

ReLU is widely seen as the default choice for activation functions in neural networks. However, there are cases where more complicated functions are required. In particular, recurrent neural networks (such as LSTMs) make extensive use of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-20 Nicholas Gerard Timmons , Andrew Rice

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have garnered significant attention in various fields of science and technology in recent years. Activation functions define how neurons in DNNs process incoming signals for them. They are essential for learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Jianfei Li , Han Feng , Ding-Xuan Zhou

In the era of Deep Neural Network based solutions for a variety of real-life tasks, having a compact and energy-efficient deployable model has become fairly important. Most of the existing deep architectures use Rectifier Linear Unit (ReLU)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Nancy Nayak , Sheetal Kalyani

Deep reinforcement learning has recently been applied to a variety of robotics applications, but learning locomotion for robots with unconventional configurations is still limited. Prior work has shown that, despite the simple modeling of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-01-31 Jiaheng Hu , Tony Dear

The scope of research in the domain of activation functions remains limited and centered around improving the ease of optimization or generalization quality of neural networks (NNs). However, to develop a deeper understanding of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Mohit Goyal , Rajan Goyal , Brejesh Lall

`Biologically inspired' activation functions, such as the logistic sigmoid, have been instrumental in the historical advancement of machine learning. However in the field of deep learning, they have been largely displaced by rectified…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-05-21 Gardave S Bhumbra

Activation functions play a key role in providing remarkable performance in deep neural networks, and the rectified linear unit (ReLU) is one of the most widely used activation functions. Various new activation functions and improvements on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-27 Yang Liu , Jianpeng Zhang , Chao Gao , Jinghua Qu , Lixin Ji

While mobile devices provide ever more compute power, improvements in DRAM bandwidth are much slower. This is unfortunate for large language model (LLM) token generation, which is heavily memory-bound. Previous work has proposed to leverage…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-04 Marco Federici , Davide Belli , Mart van Baalen , Amir Jalalirad , Andrii Skliar , Bence Major , Markus Nagel , Paul Whatmough

An activation function has a significant impact on the efficiency and robustness of the neural networks. As an alternative, we evolved a cutting-edge non-monotonic activation function, Negative Stimulated Hybrid Activation Function (Nish).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Yildiray Anagun , Sahin Isik

We theoretically discuss why deep neural networks (DNNs) performs better than other models in some cases by investigating statistical properties of DNNs for non-smooth functions. While DNNs have empirically shown higher performance than…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-07-10 Masaaki Imaizumi , Kenji Fukumizu