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Related papers: Trainable Highly-expressive Activation Functions

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Successive linear transforms followed by nonlinear "activation" functions can approximate nonlinear functions to arbitrary precision given sufficient layers. The number of necessary layers is dependent on, in part, by the nature of the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-09-26 Andrei Nicolae

Activation functions are essential to deep learning networks. Popular and versatile activation functions are mostly monotonic functions, some non-monotonic activation functions are being explored and show promising performance. But by…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-05-26 Junjia Chen , Zhibin Pan

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

Many neural network architectures rely on the choice of the activation function for each hidden layer. Given the activation function, the neural network is trained over the bias and the weight parameters. The bias catches the center of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-01 Farnoush Farhadi , Vahid Partovi Nia , Andrea Lodi

Pre-trained Vision Transformers now serve as powerful tools for computer vision. Yet, efficiently adapting them for multiple tasks remains a challenge that arises from the need to modify the rich hidden representations encoded by the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb , Bruno Ribeiro , Chaim Baskin , Moshe Eliasof

The activation function is at the heart of a deep neural networks nonlinearity; the choice of the function has great impact on the success of training. Currently, many practitioners prefer the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) due to its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-08-24 Jordan Inturrisi , Sui Yang Khoo , Abbas Kouzani , Riccardo Pagliarella

Modern neural network training relies on piece-wise (sub-)differentiable functions in order to use backpropagation to update model parameters. In this work, we introduce a novel method to allow simple non-differentiable functions at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Jason Ramapuram , Russ Webb

Many activation functions have been proposed in the past, but selecting an adequate one requires trial and error. We propose a new methodology of designing activation functions within a neural network at each layer. We call this technique…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-28 Mark Harmon , Diego Klabjan

Multi-task learning (MTL) is a common paradigm that seeks to improve the generalization performance of task learning by training related tasks simultaneously. However, it is still a challenging problem to search the flexible and accurate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Yingru Liu , Xuewen Yang , Dongliang Xie , Xin Wang , Li Shen , Haozhi Huang , Niranjan Balasubramanian

In recent years, deep neural networks (DNNs) achieved unprecedented performance in many low-level vision tasks. However, state-of-the-art results are typically achieved by very deep networks, which can reach tens of layers with tens of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-03-28 Idan Kligvasser , Tamar Rott Shaham , Tomer Michaeli

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

An increasing number of computer vision tasks can be tackled with deep features, which are the intermediate outputs of a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network. Despite the astonishing performance, deep features extracted from low-level…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-05-03 Lingxi Xie , Liang Zheng , Jingdong Wang , Alan Yuille , Qi Tian

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

Deep neural networks have been successfully used in diverse emerging domains to solve real world complex problems with may more deep learning(DL) architectures, being developed to date. To achieve these state-of-the-art performances, the DL…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-09 Chigozie Nwankpa , Winifred Ijomah , Anthony Gachagan , Stephen Marshall

Activation functions are crucial in graph neural networks (GNNs) as they allow defining a nonlinear family of functions to capture the relationship between the input graph data and their representations. This paper proposes activation…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-09-16 Bianca Iancu , Luana Ruiz , Alejandro Ribeiro , Elvin Isufi

We study neural networks with trainable low-degree rational activation functions and show that they are more expressive and parameter-efficient than modern piecewise-linear and smooth activations such as ELU, LeakyReLU, LogSigmoid, PReLU,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Maosen Tang , Alex Townsend

The expressive power of artificial neural networks crucially depends on the nonlinearity of their activation functions. Though a wide variety of nonlinear activation functions have been proposed for use in artificial neural networks, a…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2021-02-24 Jacob A. Zavatone-Veth , Cengiz Pehlevan

Deep models for facial expression recognition achieve high performance by training on large-scale labeled data. However, publicly available datasets contain uncertain facial expressions caused by ambiguous annotations or confusing emotions,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Yang Liu , Xingming Zhang , Janne Kauttonen , Guoying Zhao

Complex-valued neural networks (CVNNs) have been shown to be powerful nonlinear approximators when the input data can be properly modeled in the complex domain. One of the major challenges in scaling up CVNNs in practice is the design of…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-07 Simone Scardapane , Steven Van Vaerenbergh , Danilo Comminiello , Aurelio Uncini

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