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As a neural network's depth increases, it can improve generalization performance. However, training deep networks is challenging due to gradient and signal propagation issues. To address these challenges, extensive theoretical research and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Hyunwoo Lee , Hayoung Choi , Hyunju Kim

Activation functions play a critical role in the performance and behaviour of neural networks, significantly impacting their ability to learn and generalise. Traditional activation functions, such as ReLU, sigmoid, and tanh, have been…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-03-27 Benjamin David Winter , William John Teahan

Recent research has found that the activation function (AF) selected for adding non-linearity into the output can have a big impact on how effectively deep learning networks perform. Developing activation functions that can adapt…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Ashish Rajanand , Pradeep Singh

This paper introduces a novel parametric activation function based on Wendland radial basis functions (RBFs) for deep neural networks. Wendland RBFs, known for their compact support, smoothness, and positive definiteness in approximation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Majid Darehmiraki

Activation functions have come up as one of the essential components of neural networks. The choice of adequate activation function can impact the accuracy of these methods. In this study, we experiment for finding an optimal activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-25 Vipul Bansal

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

Using back-propagation and its variants to train deep networks is often problematic for new users. Issues such as exploding gradients, vanishing gradients, and high sensitivity to weight initialization strategies often make networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-16 Alexander G. Ororbia , Ankur Mali , Daniel Kifer , C. Lee Giles

The weight initialization and the activation function of deep neural networks have a crucial impact on the performance of the training procedure. An inappropriate selection can lead to the loss of information of the input during forward…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-05-28 Soufiane Hayou , Arnaud Doucet , Judith Rousseau

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

Recent studies have shown that the choice of activation function can significantly affect the performance of deep learning networks. However, the benefits of novel activation functions have been inconsistent and task dependent, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-25 Garrett Bingham , Risto Miikkulainen

We study the problem of learning a single neuron $\mathbf{x}\mapsto \sigma(\mathbf{w}^T\mathbf{x})$ with gradient descent (GD). All the existing positive results are limited to the case where $\sigma$ is monotonic. However, it is recently…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-02-17 Lei Wu

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

This paper proposes $\mathrm{dynActivation}$, a per-layer trainable activation defined as $f_i(x) = \mathrm{BaseAct}(x)(\alpha_i - \beta_i) + \beta_i x$, where $\alpha_i$ and $\beta_i$ are lightweight learned scalars that interpolate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Alois Bachmann

We derive bounds on the error, in high-order Sobolev norms, incurred in the approximation of Sobolev-regular as well as analytic functions by neural networks with the hyperbolic tangent activation function. These bounds provide explicit…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-09 Tim De Ryck , Samuel Lanthaler , Siddhartha Mishra

The softmax activation function plays a crucial role in the success of large language models (LLMs), particularly in the self-attention mechanism of the widely adopted Transformer architecture. However, the underlying learning dynamics that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Yang Cao , Yingyu Liang , Zhenmei Shi , Zhao Song

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…

Training feedforward neural networks with standard logistic activations is considered difficult because of the intrinsic properties of these sigmoidal functions. This work aims at showing that these networks can be trained to achieve…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Emanuele Sansone , Francesco G. B. De Natale

Activation function is a pivotal component of deep learning, facilitating the extraction of intricate data patterns. While classical activation functions like ReLU and its variants are extensively utilized, their static nature and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Barathi Subramanian , Rathinaraja Jeyaraj , Rakhmonov Akhrorjon Akhmadjon Ugli

We propose K-TanH, a novel, highly accurate, hardware efficient approximation of popular activation function TanH for Deep Learning. K-TanH consists of parameterized low-precision integer operations, such as, shift and add/subtract (no…

We propose a new method for approximating active learning acquisition strategies that are based on retraining with hypothetically-labeled candidate data points. Although this is usually infeasible with deep networks, we use the neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-05 Mohamad Amin Mohamadi , Wonho Bae , Danica J. Sutherland