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In the desire to quantify the success of neural networks in deep learning and other applications, there is a great interest in understanding which functions are efficiently approximated by the outputs of neural networks. By now, there…

A core operation in reinforcement learning (RL) is finding an action that is optimal with respect to a learned value function. This operation is often challenging when the learned value function takes continuous actions as input. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Kavosh Asadi , Neev Parikh , Ronald E. Parr , George D. Konidaris , Michael L. Littman

We study the approximation properties of shallow neural networks with an activation function which is a power of the rectified linear unit. Specifically, we consider the dependence of the approximation rate on the dimension and the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-12-23 Jonathan W. Siegel , Jinchao Xu

Smooth activation functions are ubiquitous in modern deep learning, yet their theoretical advantages over non-smooth counterparts remain poorly understood. In this work, we study both approximation and statistical properties of neural…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-03 Yuhao Liu , Zilin Wang , Lei Wu , Shaobo Zhang

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 choice of activation function fundamentally shapes the representational capacity and parameter efficiency of deep neural networks, yet most widely used activations lack rigorous theoretical guarantees on these properties. We provide a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Ibrahim Albool , Malak Gamal El-Din , Salma Elmalaki , Yasser Shoukry

This paper investigates the approximation properties of shallow neural networks with activation functions that are powers of exponential functions. It focuses on the dependence of the approximation rate on the dimension and the smoothness…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Jian Lu , Xiaohuang Huang

This work establishes a rigorous variational and gradient-based equivalence between the classical K-Means algorithm and differentiable Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural networks with smooth responsibilities. By reparameterizing the K-Means…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Felipe de Jesus Felix Arredondo , Alejandro Ucan-Puc , Carlos Astengo Noguez

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) became the standard tool for function approximation with most of the introduced architectures being developed for high-dimensional input data. However, many real-world problems have low-dimensional inputs for…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Daniel Jost , Basavasagar Patil , Xavier Alameda-Pineda , Chris Reinke

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

The efficacy of deep neural networks is heavily reliant on the design of non-linear activation functions, yet existing approaches often struggle to balance optimization stability with computational efficiency. While piecewise linear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Wentao Zhang , Yutong Zhang , Yifan Zhu , Wentao Mo

Classical results in neural network approximation theory show how arbitrary continuous functions can be approximated by networks with a single hidden layer, under mild assumptions on the activation function. However, the classical theory…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-06 Tyler Lekang , Andrew Lamperski

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial attacks due to the accumulation of perturbations in the feature level, and numerous works have boosted model robustness by deactivating the non-robust feature activations that cause model…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-03-27 Woo Jae Kim , Yoonki Cho , Junsik Jung , Sung-Eui Yoon

Activation functions are key to effective backpropagation and expressiveness in deep neural networks. This work introduces Tangma, a new activation function that combines the smooth shape of the hyperbolic tangent with two learnable…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Shreel Golwala

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

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

This study explores novel activation functions that enhance the ability of neural networks to manipulate data topology during training. Building on the limitations of traditional activation functions like $\mathrm{ReLU}$, we propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Pavel Snopov , Oleg R. Musin

It is well-known that overparametrized neural networks trained using gradient-based methods quickly achieve small training error with appropriate hyperparameter settings. Recent papers have proved this statement theoretically for highly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-13 Abhishek Panigrahi , Abhishek Shetty , Navin Goyal

We propose reproducing activation functions (RAFs) to improve deep learning accuracy for various applications ranging from computer vision to scientific computing. The idea is to employ several basic functions and their learnable linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-23 Senwei Liang , Liyao Lyu , Chunmei Wang , Haizhao Yang

We propose a differential radial basis function (RBF) network termed RBF-DiffNet -- whose hidden layer blocks are partial differential equations (PDEs) linear in terms of the RBF -- to make the baseline RBF network robust to noise in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Kojo Sarfo Gyamfi , James Brusey , Elena Gaura