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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

Activation functions play a significant role in neural network design by enabling non-linearity. The choice of activation function was previously shown to influence the properties of the resulting loss landscape. Understanding the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Anna Sergeevna Bosman , Andries Engelbrecht , Marde Helbig

In the field of pattern recognition, achieving high accuracy is essential. While training a model to recognize different complex images, it is vital to fine-tune the model to achieve the highest accuracy possible. One strategy for…

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

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

In this paper, we propose a novel activation function tailored specifically for graph data in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Motivated by the need for graph-adaptive and flexible activation functions, we introduce DiGRAF, leveraging…

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 loss function used to train a neural network is strongly connected to its output layer from a statistical point of view. This technical report analyzes common activation functions for a neural network output layer, like linear, sigmoid,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Fernando Berzal

This article proposes a Universal Activation Function (UAF) that achieves near optimal performance in quantification, classification, and reinforcement learning (RL) problems. For any given problem, the optimization algorithms are able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-07 Brosnan Yuen , Minh Tu Hoang , Xiaodai Dong , Tao Lu

Learned activation functions in models like Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) outperform fixed-activation architectures in terms of accuracy and interpretability; however, their computational complexity poses critical challenges for…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Mengyuan Yin , Benjamin Chen Ming Choong , Chuping Qu , Rick Siow Mong Goh , Weng-Fai Wong , Tao Luo

Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Seokhun Park , Choeun Kim , Kwanho Lee , Sehyun Park , Insung Kong , Yongdai Kim

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

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

In Neural Networks (NN), Adaptive Activation Functions (AAF) have parameters that control the shapes of activation functions. These parameters are trained along with other parameters in the NN. AAFs have improved performance of Neural…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2016-08-24 Le Hou , Dimitris Samaras , Tahsin M. Kurc , Yi Gao , Joel H. Saltz

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have emerged as a powerful framework for modeling continuous signals. The spectral bias of ReLU-based networks is a well-established limitation, restricting their ability to capture fine-grained…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Alireza Morsali , MohammadJavad Vaez , Mohammadhossein Soltani , Amirhossein Kazerouni , Babak Taati , Morteza Mohammad-Noori

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

Fourier Analysis Network (FAN) was recently proposed as a simple way to improve neural network performance by replacing part of Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activations with sine and cosine functions. Although several studies have reported…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Sam Jeong , Hae Yong Kim

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 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

We prove a large deviation principle for deep neural networks with Gaussian weights and at most linearly growing activation functions, such as ReLU. This generalises earlier work, in which bounded and continuous activation functions were…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-02-10 Quirin Vogel