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Activation functions play a crucial role in neural networks because they are the nonlinearities which have been attributed to the success story of deep learning. One of the currently most popular activation functions is ReLU, but several…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-01-10 Steffen Eger , Paul Youssef , Iryna Gurevych

Tremendous advances in image restoration tasks such as denoising and super-resolution have been achieved using neural networks. Such approaches generally employ very deep architectures, large number of parameters, large receptive fields and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Shuhang Gu , Radu Timofte , Luc Van Gool

This paper provides an analysis of state-of-the-art activation functions with respect to supervised classification of deep neural network. These activation functions comprise of Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Unit (ELU),…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Anh Nguyen , Khoa Pham , Dat Ngo , Thanh Ngo , Lam Pham

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

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

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.…

Deep learning at its core, contains functions that are composition of a linear transformation with a non-linear function known as activation function. In past few years, there is an increasing interest in construction of novel activation…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-09-09 Koushik Biswas , Sandeep Kumar , Shilpak Banerjee , Ashish Kumar Pandey

An activation function has a significant impact on the efficiency and robustness of the neural networks. As an alternative, we evolved a cutting-edge non-monotonic activation function, Negative Stimulated Hybrid Activation Function (Nish).…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-20 Yildiray Anagun , Sahin Isik

Artificial neural networks typically have a fixed, non-linear activation function at each neuron. We have designed a novel form of piecewise linear activation function that is learned independently for each neuron using gradient descent.…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2015-04-22 Forest Agostinelli , Matthew Hoffman , Peter Sadowski , Pierre Baldi

We provide an overview of several non-linear activation functions in a neural network architecture that have proven successful in many machine learning applications. We conduct an empirical analysis on the effectiveness of using these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Giovanni Alcantara

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

Activation functions govern the expressivity and stability of neural networks, yet existing comparisons remain largely heuristic. We propose a rigorous framework for their classification via a nine-dimensional integral signature…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Ankur Mali , Lawrence Hall , Jake Williams , Gordon Richards

In the era of Deep Neural Network based solutions for a variety of real-life tasks, having a compact and energy-efficient deployable model has become fairly important. Most of the existing deep architectures use Rectifier Linear Unit (ReLU)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Nancy Nayak , Sheetal Kalyani

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

Selecting the most suitable activation function is a critical factor in the effectiveness of deep learning models, as it influences their learning capacity, stability, and computational efficiency. In recent years, the Gaussian Error Linear…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-02 Minhyeok Lee

We present a new approach for input optimization of ReLU networks that explicitly takes into account the effect of changes in activation patterns. We analyze local optimization steps in both the input space and the space of activation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Hongzhan Yu , Sicun Gao

In this work, we systematically investigate the efficacy of dynamic activation mechanisms within the LLaMA family of language models. Despite the potential of dynamic activation methods to reduce computation and increase speed in models…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Chi Ma , Mincong Huang , Chao Wang , Yujie Wang , Lei Yu

The choice of activation function in deep networks has a significant effect on the training dynamics and task performance. At present, the most effective and widely-used activation function is ReLU. However, because of the non-zero mean,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-03-03 Yuan Zhou , Dandan Li , Shuwei Huo , Sun-Yuan Kung

In recent years, neural networks have enjoyed a renaissance as function approximators in reinforcement learning. Two decades after Tesauro's TD-Gammon achieved near top-level human performance in backgammon, the deep reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-03 Stefan Elfwing , Eiji Uchibe , Kenji Doya

Dynamic adaptation in single-neuron response plays a fundamental role in neural coding in biological neural networks. Yet, most neural activation functions used in artificial networks are fixed and mostly considered as an inconsequential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Victor Geadah , Giancarlo Kerg , Stefan Horoi , Guy Wolf , Guillaume Lajoie