English
Related papers

Related papers: Activation function optimization method: Learnable…

200 papers

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

Activation functions play a critical role in deep neural networks by shaping gradient flow, optimization stability, and generalization. While ReLU remains widely used due to its simplicity, it suffers from gradient sparsity and dead-neuron…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ashkan Shakarami , Yousef Yeganeh , Azade Farshad , Lorenzo Nicolè , Stefano Ghidoni , Nassir Navab

Our work proposes a novel approach to designing activation functions by focusing on their gradients and deriving the corresponding activation functions using integration. We introduce the Expanded Integral of the Exponential Linear Unit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Allen Hao Huang , Imanol Schlag

In neural networks, non-linearity is introduced by activation functions. One commonly used activation function is Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). ReLU has been a popular choice as an activation but has flaws. State-of-the-art functions like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Advait Vagerwal

Researchers have proposed various activation functions. These activation functions help the deep network to learn non-linear behavior with a significant effect on training dynamics and task performance. The performance of these activations…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-01-07 Pravendra Singh , Munender Varshney , Vinay P. Namboodiri

Activation function is a key component in deep learning that performs non-linear mappings between the inputs and outputs. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) has been the most popular activation function across the deep learning community.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Hock Hung Chieng , Noorhaniza Wahid , Pauline Ong

ReLU, a commonly used activation function in deep neural networks, is prone to the issue of "Dying ReLU". Several enhanced versions, such as ELU, SeLU, and Swish, have been introduced and are considered to be less commonly utilized.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Rubiqa Zulfiqar , Asad Khan , Nimra

We introduce the "inverse square root linear unit" (ISRLU) to speed up learning in deep neural networks. ISRLU has better performance than ELU but has many of the same benefits. ISRLU and ELU have similar curves and characteristics. Both…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-13 Brad Carlile , Guy Delamarter , Paul Kinney , Akiko Marti , Brian Whitney

A pivotal aspect in the design of neural networks lies in selecting activation functions, crucial for introducing nonlinear structures that capture intricate input-output patterns. While the effectiveness of adaptive or trainable activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Farhad Pourkamali-Anaraki , Tahamina Nasrin , Robert E. Jensen , Amy M. Peterson , Christopher J. Hansen

This paper provides an analysis of state-of-the-art activation functions with respect to supervised classification of deep neural network. These activation functions comprise of Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Unit (ELU),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Anh Nguyen , Khoa Pham , Dat Ngo , Thanh Ngo , Lam Pham

Rectified linear unit (ReLU) is a widely used activation function for deep convolutional neural networks. However, because of the zero-hard rectification, ReLU networks miss the benefits from negative values. In this paper, we propose a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-01-30 Suo Qiu , Xiangmin Xu , Bolun Cai

A general procedure for introducing parametric, learned, nonlinearity into activation functions is found to enhance the accuracy of representative neural networks without requiring significant additional computational resources. Examples…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-14 David Yevick

Amongst others, the adoption of Rectified Linear Units (ReLUs) is regarded as one of the ingredients of the success of deep learning. ReLU activation has been shown to mitigate the vanishing gradient issue, to encourage sparsity in the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-14 Nicola Picchiotti , Marco Gori

We introduce the "exponential linear unit" (ELU) which speeds up learning in deep neural networks and leads to higher classification accuracies. Like rectified linear units (ReLUs), leaky ReLUs (LReLUs) and parametrized ReLUs (PReLUs), ELUs…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-02-23 Djork-Arné Clevert , Thomas Unterthiner , Sepp Hochreiter

Activation functions are non-linearities in neural networks that allow them to learn complex mapping between inputs and outputs. Typical choices for activation functions are ReLU, Tanh, Sigmoid etc., where the choice generally depends on…

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

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

Many industrial and real life problems exhibit highly nonlinear periodic behaviors and the conventional methods may fall short of finding their analytical or closed form solutions. Such problems demand some cutting edge computational tools…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-20 Jamshaid Ul Rahman , Faiza Makhdoom , Dianchen Lu

In contemporary large language models (LLMs), the swish-gated linear unit (SwiGLU) activation function is widely adopted to regulate the information flow and introduce non-linearity. For large positive inputs, SwiGLU approximates the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Peijie Jiang , Yuqi Feng , Cunyin Peng , Qian Zhao , Jia Liu , KunLong Chen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou

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