English
Related papers

Related papers: APALU: A Trainable, Adaptive Activation Function f…

200 papers

Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mingi Kang , Zai Yang , Jeova Farias Sales Rocha Neto

A wide variety of activation functions have been proposed for neural networks. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is especially popular today. There are many practical reasons that motivate the use of the ReLU. This paper provides new…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-10-19 Rahul Parhi , Robert D. Nowak

Activation Functions introduce non-linearity in the deep neural networks. This nonlinearity helps the neural networks learn faster and efficiently from the dataset. In deep learning, many activation functions are developed and used based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Ravin Kumar

In the current research of neural networks, the activation function is manually specified by human and not able to change themselves during training. This paper focus on how to make the activation function trainable for deep neural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-06-08 Zhaohe Liao

In this study, we propose a new activation function, called Adaptive Smooth Activation Unit (ASAU), tailored for optimized gradient propagation, thereby enhancing the proficiency of convolutional networks in medical image analysis. We apply…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-12-20 Koushik Biswas , Debesh Jha , Nikhil Kumar Tomar , Gorkem Durak , Alpay Medetalibeyoglu , Matthew Antalek , Yury Velichko , Daniela Ladner , Amir Bohrani , Ulas Bagci

Activation functions play a decisive role in determining the capacity of Deep Neural Networks as they enable neural networks to capture inherent nonlinearities present in data fed to them. The prior research on activation functions…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Faiza Makhdoom , Dianchen Lu

Neural networks have shown tremendous growth in recent years to solve numerous problems. Various types of neural networks have been introduced to deal with different types of problems. However, the main goal of any neural network is to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Shiv Ram Dubey , Satish Kumar Singh , Bidyut Baran Chaudhuri

The rectified linear unit (ReLU) is a highly successful activation function in neural networks as it allows networks to easily obtain sparse representations, which reduces overfitting in overparameterized networks. However, in network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-14 Shiyu Liu , Rohan Ghosh , Dylan Tan , Mehul Motani

Activation functions are central to deep networks, influencing non-linearity, feature learning, convergence, and robustness. This paper proposes the Adaptive Arctangent Gated Activation (ArcGate) function, a flexible formulation that…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Avik Bhattacharya , Siddhant Dnyanesh Gole , Subhasis Chaudhuri , Alejandro C. Frery , Biplab Banerjee

Well-known activation functions like ReLU or Leaky ReLU are non-differentiable at the origin. Over the years, many smooth approximations of ReLU have been proposed using various smoothing techniques. We propose new smooth approximations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-28 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

Activation functions in neural networks are typically selected from a set of empirically validated, commonly used static functions such as ReLU, tanh, or sigmoid. However, by optimizing the shapes of a network's activation functions, we can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 William H Patty

Deep learning training training algorithms are a huge success in recent years in many fields including speech, text,image video etc. Deeper and deeper layers are proposed with huge success with resnet structures having around 152 layers.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Chinmay Rane , Kanishka Tyagi , Michael Manry

In this paper, we introduce "Power Linear Unit" (PoLU) which increases the nonlinearity capacity of a neural network and thus helps improving its performance. PoLU adopts several advantages of previously proposed activation functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-02-02 Yikang Li , Pak Lun Kevin Ding , Baoxin Li

There has been a growing interest in expressivity of deep neural networks. However, most of the existing work about this topic focuses only on the specific activation function such as ReLU or sigmoid. In this paper, we investigate the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-07-24 Ilsang Ohn , Yongdai Kim

Real-world analog systems intrinsically suffer from noise that can impede model convergence and accuracy on a variety of deep learning models. We demonstrate that differentiable activations like GELU and SiLU enable robust propagation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Vivswan Shah , Nathan Youngblood

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

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

Despite the unresolved 'dying ReLU problem', the classical ReLU activation function (AF) has been extensively applied in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), for image classification. The common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Stamatis Mastromichalakis

We propose a novel activation function that implements piece-wise orthogonal non-linear mappings based on permutations. It is straightforward to implement, and very computationally efficient, also it has little memory requirements. We…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-02-02 Artem Chernodub , Dimitri Nowicki

Deep learning is currently extensively employed across a range of research domains. The continuous advancements in deep learning techniques contribute to solving intricate challenges. Activation functions (AF) are fundamental components…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Asmaa Benchama , Khalid Zebbara