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The choice of activation function can have a large effect on the performance of a neural network. While there have been some attempts to hand-engineer novel activation functions, the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-14 Garrett Bingham , William Macke , Risto Miikkulainen

One of the reasons why many neural networks are capable of replicating complicated tasks or functions is their universal property. Though the past few decades have seen tremendous advances in theories of neural networks, a single…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Tan Bui-Thanh

Nonlinear activation functions are widely recognized for enhancing the expressivity of neural networks, which is the primary reason for their widespread implementation. In this work, we focus on ReLU activation and reveal a novel and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Chaoyue Liu , Han Bi , Like Hui , Xiao Liu

Dynamic adaptation in single-neuron response plays a fundamental role in neural coding in biological neural networks. Yet, most neural activation functions used in artificial networks are fixed and mostly considered as an inconsequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Victor Geadah , Giancarlo Kerg , Stefan Horoi , Guy Wolf , Guillaume Lajoie

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

Activation functions play a vital role in the training of Convolutional Neural Networks. For this reason, to develop efficient and performing functions is a crucial problem in the deep learning community. Key to these approaches is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Gianluca Maguolo , Loris Nanni , Stefano Ghidoni

Neural networks have proven to be a highly effective tool for solving complex problems in many areas of life. Recently, their importance and practical usability have further been reinforced with the advent of deep learning. One of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-15 Vladimír Kunc , Jiří Kléma

Activation functions play a key role in neural networks so it becomes fundamental to understand their advantages and disadvantages in order to achieve better performances. This paper will first introduce common types of non linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-04-10 Dabal Pedamonti

In this work, we propose activation functions for neuronal networks that are refinable and sum the identity. This new class of activation functions allows the insertion of new layers between existing ones and/or the increase of neurons in a…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-05-07 Sergio López-Ureña

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Alberto Marchisio , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Semeen Rehman , Maurizio Martina , Muhammad Shafique

Non-linear activation functions, e.g., Sigmoid, ReLU, and Tanh, have achieved great success in neural networks (NNs). Due to the complex non-linear characteristic of samples, the objective of those activation functions is to project samples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-23 Tiantian He , Zhibin Li , Yongshun Gong , Yazhou Yao , Xiushan Nie , Yilong Yin

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

The effectiveness of deep neural architectures has been widely supported in terms of both experimental and foundational principles. There is also clear evidence that the activation function (e.g. the rectifier and the LSTM units) plays a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Giuseppe Marra , Dario Zanca , Alessandro Betti , Marco Gori

Recent seminal work at the intersection of deep neural networks practice and random matrix theory has linked the convergence speed and robustness of these networks with the combination of random weight initialization and nonlinear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Pierre H. Richemond , Yike Guo

In neural networks literature, there is a strong interest in identifying and defining activation functions which can improve neural network performance. In recent years there has been a renovated interest of the scientific community in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-01 Andrea Apicella , Francesco Donnarumma , Francesco Isgrò , Roberto Prevete

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

This paper studies the role of activation functions in learning modular addition with two-layer neural networks. We first establish a sharp expressivity gap: sine MLPs admit width-$2$ exact realizations for any fixed length $m$ and, with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Tianlong Huang , Zhiyuan Li

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

Activation functions play a crucial role in neural networks because they are the nonlinearities which have been attributed to the success story of deep learning. One of the currently most popular activation functions is ReLU, but several…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Steffen Eger , Paul Youssef , Iryna Gurevych

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