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Recent research has found that the activation function (AF) selected for adding non-linearity into the output can have a big impact on how effectively deep learning networks perform. Developing activation functions that can adapt…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Ashish Rajanand , Pradeep Singh

The widely used ReLU is favored for its hardware efficiency, {as the implementation at inference is a one bit sign case,} yet suffers from issues such as the ``dying ReLU'' problem, where during training, neurons fail to activate and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Moshe Kimhi , Idan Kashani , Avi Mendelson , Chaim Baskin

Activation function is crucial to the recent successes of deep neural networks. In this paper, we first propose a new activation function, Multiple Parametric Exponential Linear Units (MPELU), aiming to generalize and unify the rectified…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-01-18 Yang Li , Chunxiao Fan , Yong Li , Qiong Wu , Yue Ming

In the last decade, an active area of research has been devoted to design novel activation functions that are able to help deep neural networks to converge, obtaining better performance. The training procedure of these architectures usually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-26 Franco Manessi , Alessandro Rozza

`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

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

We propose the Hyperbolic Tangent Exponential Linear Unit (TeLU), a neural network hidden activation function defined as TeLU(x)=xtanh(exp(x)). TeLU's design is grounded in the core principles of key activation functions, achieving strong…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Alfredo Fernandez , Ankur Mali

Gated Linear Units (GLUs) have become essential components in the feed-forward networks of state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). However, they require twice as many memory reads compared to feed-forward layers without gating, due…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-01 Yukito Tajima , Nakamasa Inoue , Yusuke Sekikawa , Ikuro Sato , Rio Yokota

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

In this paper, a novel neural network activation function, called Symmetrical Gaussian Error Linear Unit (SGELU), is proposed to obtain high performance. It is achieved by effectively integrating the property of the stochastic regularizer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Chao Yu , Zhiguo Su

Deep networks are gradually penetrating almost every domain in our lives due to their amazing success. However, with substantive performance accuracy improvements comes the price of \emph{irreproducibility}. Two identical models, trained on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Gil I. Shamir , Dong Lin , Lorenzo Coviello

Despite their widespread success, deep neural networks remain critically vulnerable to adversarial attacks, posing significant risks in safety-sensitive applications. This paper investigates activation functions as a crucial yet…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yunrui Yu , Kafeng Wang , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

The most widely used activation functions in current deep feed-forward neural networks are rectified linear units (ReLU), and many alternatives have been successfully applied, as well. However, none of the alternatives have managed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-27 Leon René Sütfeld , Flemming Brieger , Holger Finger , Sonja Füllhase , Gordon Pipa

The softmax gating function is arguably the most popular choice in mixture of experts modeling. Despite its widespread use in practice, the softmax gating may lead to unnecessary competition among experts, potentially causing the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-11-05 Huy Nguyen , Nhat Ho , Alessandro Rinaldo

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

Speech recognition is largely taking advantage of deep learning, showing that substantial benefits can be obtained by modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). The most popular RNNs are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs), which typically reach…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-03 Mirco Ravanelli , Philemon Brakel , Maurizio Omologo , Yoshua Bengio

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

The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is a foundational activation function in artficial neural networks. Recent literature frequently misattributes its origin to the 2018 (initial) version of this paper, which exclusively investigated ReLU at…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Abien Fred Agarap

Activation functions are essential to introduce nonlinearity into neural networks, with the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) often favored for its simplicity and effectiveness. Motivated by the structural similarity between a shallow…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Jiayun Li , Yuxiao Cheng , Yiwen Lu , Zhuofan Xia , Yilin Mo , Gao Huang

Biological neural systems employ diverse neurotransmitters -- glutamate, GABA, dopamine, acetylcholine -- to implement distinct signal-processing modalities within shared neural circuits. In contrast, modern transformers apply a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Daniel Nobrega Medeiros