English
Related papers

Related papers: VeLU: Variance-enhanced Learning Unit for Deep Neu…

200 papers

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

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

Even in recent neural network architectures such as Transformers and Extended LSTM (xLSTM), and traditional ones like Convolutional Neural Networks, Activation Functions are an integral part of nearly all neural networks. They enable more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Matias Roodschild , Jorge Gotay-Sardiñas , Victor A. Jimenez , Adrian Will

We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU activation function is $x\Phi(x)$, where $\Phi(x)$ the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Dan Hendrycks , Kevin Gimpel

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 learning researchers have a keen interest in proposing two new novel activation functions which can boost network performance. A good choice of activation function can have significant consequences in improving network performance. A…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

The choice of activation functions is crucial for modern deep neural networks. Popular hand-designed activation functions like Rectified Linear Unit(ReLU) and its variants show promising performance in various tasks and models. Swish, the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yucong Zhou , Zezhou Zhu , Zhao Zhong

Effective activation functions introduce non-linear transformations, providing neural networks with stronger fitting capa-bilities, which help them better adapt to real data distributions. Huawei Noah's Lab believes that dynamic activation…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Chuan Feng , Xi Lin , Shiping Zhu , Hongkang Shi , Maojie Tang , Hua Huang

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

We provide a theoretical explanation of the role of the number of nodes at each layer in deep neural networks. We prove that the largest variation of a deep neural network with ReLU activation function arises when the layer with the fewest…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-12-11 Yongdai Kim , Dongha Kim

Modeling sophisticated activation functions within deep learning architectures has evolved into a distinct research direction. Functions such as GELU, SELU, and SiLU offer smooth gradients and improved convergence properties, making them…

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

Despite the unresolved 'dying ReLU problem', the classical ReLU activation function (AF) has been extensively applied in Deep Neural Networks (DNN), in particular Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), for image classification. The common…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-30 Stamatis Mastromichalakis

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

This study introduces a novel activation function, characterized by a dynamic slope that adjusts throughout the training process, aimed at enhancing adaptability and performance in deep neural networks for computer vision tasks. The…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Archisman Chakraborti , Bidyut B Chaudhuri

We propose the Moderate Adaptive Linear Unit (MoLU), a novel activation function for deep neural networks, defined analytically as: f(x)=x \times (1+tanh(x))/2. MoLU combines mathematical elegance with empirical effectiveness, exhibiting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Hankyul Koh , Joon-hyuk Ko , Wonho Jhe

We introduce stochastic activations. This novel strategy randomly selects between several non-linear functions in the feed-forward layer of a large language model. In particular, we choose between SILU or RELU depending on a Bernoulli draw.…

Activation functions are fundamental for enabling nonlinear representations in deep neural networks. However, the standard rectified linear unit (ReLU) often suffers from inactive or "dead" neurons caused by its hard zero cutoff. To address…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Md Motaleb Hossen Manik , Md Zabirul Islam , Ge Wang

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

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