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Language models (LMs) exhibit impressive performance and generalization capabilities. However, LMs struggle with the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, which undermines their long-term sustainability in continual learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Wenyu Du , Shuang Cheng , Tongxu Luo , Zihan Qiu , Zeyu Huang , Ka Chun Cheung , Reynold Cheng , Jie Fu

Most deep neural networks use simple, fixed activation functions, such as sigmoids or rectified linear units, regardless of domain or network structure. We introduce differential equation units (DEUs), an improvement to modern neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-21 MohamadAli Torkamani , Phillip Wallis , Shiv Shankar , Amirmohammad Rooshenas

Analog hardware implemented deep learning models are promising for computation and energy constrained systems such as edge computing devices. However, the analog nature of the device and the associated many noise sources will cause changes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-18 Omobayode Fagbohungbe , Lijun Qian

The ability to learn continually is essential in a complex and changing world. In this paper, we characterize the behavior of canonical value-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches under varying degrees of non-stationarity. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Zaheer Abbas , Rosie Zhao , Joseph Modayil , Adam White , Marlos C. Machado

Activation functions have been shown to affect the performance of deep neural networks significantly. While the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the dominant choice in practice, the optimal activation function for deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 John Chidiac , Danielle Azar

In this article we study high-dimensional approximation capacities of shallow and deep artificial neural networks (ANNs) with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation. In particular, it is a key contribution of this work to reveal that…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-01-23 Lukas Gonon , Robin Graeber , Arnulf Jentzen

For most state-of-the-art architectures, Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) becomes a standard component accompanied with each layer. Although ReLU can ease the network training to an extent, the character of blocking negative values may suppress…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-11-20 Xuanyi Dong , Guoliang Kang , Kun Zhan , Yi Yang

The success of deep learning has brought forth a wave of interest in computer hardware design to better meet the high demands of neural network inference. In particular, analog computing hardware has been heavily motivated specifically for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Chuteng Zhou , Prad Kadambi , Matthew Mattina , Paul N. Whatmough

Deep learning has been widely used in many fields, but the model training process usually consumes massive computational resources and time. Therefore, designing an efficient neural network training method with a provable convergence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-14 Lianke Qin , Zhao Song , Yuanyuan Yang

Activation functions are critical components in deep neural networks, directly influencing gradient flow, training stability, and model performance. Traditional functions like ReLU suffer from dead neuron problems, while sigmoid and tanh…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sergii Kavun

This paper proposes $\mathrm{dynActivation}$, a per-layer trainable activation defined as $f_i(x) = \mathrm{BaseAct}(x)(\alpha_i - \beta_i) + \beta_i x$, where $\alpha_i$ and $\beta_i$ are lightweight learned scalars that interpolate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alois Bachmann

This work provides a thorough study on how reward scaling can affect performance of deep reinforcement learning agents. In particular, we would like to answer the question that how does reward scaling affect non-saturating ReLU networks in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-01 Yueh-Hua Wu , Fan-Yun Sun , Yen-Yu Chang , Shou-De Lin

Effective activation functions introduce non-linear transformations, providing neural networks with stronger fitting capa-bilities, which help them better adapt to real data distributions. Huawei Noah's Lab believes that dynamic activation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Chuan Feng , Xi Lin , Shiping Zhu , Hongkang Shi , Maojie Tang , Hua Huang

Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) have been shown to ameliorate the vanishing gradient problem, allow for efficient backpropagation, and empirically promote sparsity in the learned parameters. They have led to state-of-the-art results in a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-05-30 Xingyuan Pan , Vivek Srikumar

Stochastic regularisation is an important weapon in the arsenal of a deep learning practitioner. However, despite recent theoretical advances, our understanding of how noise influences signal propagation in deep neural networks remains…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-03 Arnu Pretorius , Elan Van Biljon , Steve Kroon , Herman Kamper

In many numerical simulations stochastic gradient descent (SGD) type optimization methods perform very effectively in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs) but till this day it remains an open problem of research to provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Martin Hutzenthaler , Arnulf Jentzen , Katharina Pohl , Adrian Riekert , Luca Scarpa

The Rectified Power Unit (RePU) activation function, a differentiable generalization of the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU), has shown promise in constructing neural networks due to its smoothness properties. However, deep RePU networks often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Taeyoung Kim , Myungjoo Kang

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success across diverse domains, but their performance can be severely degraded by noisy or corrupted training data. Conventional noise mitigation methods often rely on explicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Deliang Jin , Gang Chen , Shuo Feng , Yufeng Ling , Haoran Zhu

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

Deep learning models are often successfully trained using gradient descent, despite the worst case hardness of the underlying non-convex optimization problem. The key question is then under what conditions can one prove that optimization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-02-28 Alon Brutzkus , Amir Globerson