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Related papers: Stochastic activations

200 papers

Many efforts have been devoted to training generative latent variable models with autoregressive decoders, such as recurrent neural networks (RNN). Stochastic recurrent models have been successful in capturing the variability observed in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-17 Anirudh Goyal , Alessandro Sordoni , Marc-Alexandre Côté , Nan Rosemary Ke , Yoshua Bengio

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

When optimizing a nonlinear objective, one can employ a neural network as a surrogate for the nonlinear function. However, the resulting optimization model can be time-consuming to solve globally with exact methods. As a result, local…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Jiatai Tong , Yilin Zhu , Thiago Serra , Samuel Burer

Activation functions are critical components in deep neural networks, directly influencing gradient flow, training stability, and model performance. Traditional functions like ReLU suffer from dead neuron problems, while sigmoid and tanh…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Sergii Kavun

How can we efficiently propagate uncertainty in a latent state representation with recurrent neural networks? This paper introduces stochastic recurrent neural networks which glue a deterministic recurrent neural network and a state space…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-15 Marco Fraccaro , Søren Kaae Sønderby , Ulrich Paquet , Ole Winther

Activation sparsity can enable practical inference speedups in large language models (LLMs) by reducing the compute and memory-movement required for matrix multiplications during the forward pass. However, existing methods face limitations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 James Liu , Pragaash Ponnusamy , Tianle Cai , Han Guo , Yoon Kim , Ben Athiwaratkun

How can local-search methods such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) avoid bad local minima in training multi-layer neural networks? Why can they fit random labels even given non-convex and non-smooth architectures? Most existing theory…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-28 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li , Zhao Song

Activation functions (AFs) play a pivotal role in the performance of neural networks. The Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) is currently the most commonly used AF. Several replacements to ReLU have been suggested but improvements have proven…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2022-06-27 Raz Lapid , Moshe Sipper

We analyze the efficiency of parallelization and restart mechanisms for stochastic simulations in model-free settings, where the underlying system dynamics are unknown. Such settings are common in Reinforcement Learning (RL) and rare event…

Probability · Mathematics 2026-05-07 Ernesto Garcia , Paola Bermolen , Matthieu Jonckheere , Seva Shneer

We introduce exact macroscopic on-line learning dynamics of two-layer neural networks with ReLU units in the form of a system of differential equations, using techniques borrowed from statistical physics. For the first experiments,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-19 Michiel Straat , Michael Biehl

Recently, convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been used as a powerful tool to solve many problems of machine learning and computer vision. In this paper, we aim to provide insight on the property of convolutional neural networks, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-20 Wenling Shang , Kihyuk Sohn , Diogo Almeida , Honglak Lee

We introduce a stochastic framework into the open--source Core Imaging Library (CIL) which enables easy development of stochastic algorithms. Five such algorithms from the literature are developed, Stochastic Gradient Descent, Stochastic…

Activation functions are crucial in deep learning models since they introduce non-linearity into the networks, allowing them to learn from errors and make adjustments, which is essential for learning complex patterns. The essential purpose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Koushik Biswas , Meghana Karri , Ulaş Bağcı

The primary neural networks decision-making units are activation functions. Moreover, they evaluate the output of networks neural node; thus, they are essential for the performance of the whole network. Hence, it is critical to choose the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Tomasz Szandała

Activation functions have been shown to affect the performance of deep neural networks significantly. While the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the dominant choice in practice, the optimal activation function for deep neural networks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 John Chidiac , Danielle Azar

We present a probabilistic framework for nonlinearities, based on doubly truncated Gaussian distributions. By setting the truncation points appropriately, we are able to generate various types of nonlinearities within a unified framework,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-09-20 Qinliang Su , Xuejun Liao , Lawrence Carin

Activation functions play a vital role in the training of Convolutional Neural Networks. For this reason, to develop efficient and performing functions is a crucial problem in the deep learning community. Key to these approaches is to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-09-23 Gianluca Maguolo , Loris Nanni , Stefano Ghidoni

We present a new algorithm to generate minimal, stable, and symbolic corrections to an input that will cause a neural network with ReLU activations to change its output. We argue that such a correction is a useful way to provide feedback to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-09-03 Xin Zhang , Armando Solar-Lezama , Rishabh Singh

Our community has greatly improved the efficiency of deep learning applications, including by exploiting sparsity in inputs. Most of that work, though, is for inference, where weight sparsity is known statically, and/or for specialized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Zhangxiaowen Gong , Houxiang Ji , Christopher Fletcher , Christopher Hughes , Josep Torrellas

Activation function is crucial to the recent successes of deep neural networks. In this paper, we first propose a new activation function, Multiple Parametric Exponential Linear Units (MPELU), aiming to generalize and unify the rectified…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-01-18 Yang Li , Chunxiao Fan , Yong Li , Qiong Wu , Yue Ming