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Deep neural networks, particularly those employing Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), are often perceived as complex, high-dimensional, non-linear systems. This complexity poses a significant challenge to understanding their internal learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Longqing Ye

In this article we identify a general class of high-dimensional continuous functions that can be approximated by deep neural networks (DNNs) with the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation without the curse of dimensionality. In other…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2023-04-13 Adrian Riekert

The most widely used activation functions in current deep feed-forward neural networks are rectified linear units (ReLU), and many alternatives have been successfully applied, as well. However, none of the alternatives have managed to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-06-27 Leon René Sütfeld , Flemming Brieger , Holger Finger , Sonja Füllhase , Gordon Pipa

The dominant paradigm in modern neural networks relies on simple, monotonically-increasing activation functions like ReLU. While effective, this paradigm necessitates large, massively-parameterized models to approximate complex functions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Shiko Kudo

The number of linear regions is one of the distinct properties of the neural networks using piecewise linear activation functions such as ReLU, comparing with those conventional ones using other activation functions. Previous studies showed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-15 Rui Zhu , Bo Lin , Haixu Tang

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

This paper aims to understand the training solution, which is obtained by the back-propagation algorithm, of two-layer neural networks whose hidden layer is composed of the units with smooth activation functions, including the usual sigmoid…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Changcun Huang

Deep neural networks have recently achieved state-of-the-art results in many machine learning problems, e.g., speech recognition or object recognition. Hitherto, work on rectified linear units (ReLU) provides empirical and theoretical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-05-12 Jakub Mikolaj Tomczak

Modeling real-world distributions can often be challenging due to sample data that are subjected to perturbations, e.g., instrumentation errors, or added random noise. Since flow models are typically nonlinear algorithms, they amplify these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Sameera Ramasinghe , Kasun Fernando , Salman Khan , Nick Barnes

The effectiveness of deep neural architectures has been widely supported in terms of both experimental and foundational principles. There is also clear evidence that the activation function (e.g. the rectifier and the LSTM units) plays a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-08 Giuseppe Marra , Dario Zanca , Alessandro Betti , Marco Gori

In neural networks, non-linearity is introduced by activation functions. One commonly used activation function is Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU). ReLU has been a popular choice as an activation but has flaws. State-of-the-art functions like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-23 Advait Vagerwal

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 construction of $C^m$ conforming finite elements on simplicial meshes has recently advanced through the groundbreaking work of Hu, Lin, and Wu (Found. Comput. Math. 24, 2024). Their framework characterizes smoothness via moments of…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-07-29 Chunyu Chen , Long Chen , Tingyi Gao , Xuehai Huang , Huayi Wei

We present an explicit deep neural network construction that transforms uniformly distributed one-dimensional noise into an arbitrarily close approximation of any two-dimensional Lipschitz-continuous target distribution. The key ingredient…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Dmytro Perekrestenko , Stephan Müller , Helmut Bölcskei

The scope of research in the domain of activation functions remains limited and centered around improving the ease of optimization or generalization quality of neural networks (NNs). However, to develop a deeper understanding of deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-10 Mohit Goyal , Rajan Goyal , Brejesh Lall

In this paper we prove that Local (S)GD (or FedAvg) can optimize deep neural networks with Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) activation function in polynomial time. Despite the established convergence theory of Local SGD on optimizing general…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-23 Yuyang Deng , Mohammad Mahdi Kamani , Mehrdad Mahdavi

We study the necessary and sufficient complexity of ReLU neural networks---in terms of depth and number of weights---which is required for approximating classifier functions in $L^2$. As a model class, we consider the set $\mathcal{E}^\beta…

Functional Analysis · Mathematics 2018-05-23 Philipp Petersen , Felix Voigtlaender

Recently, self-normalizing neural networks (SNNs) have been proposed with the intention to avoid batch or weight normalization. The key step in SNNs is to properly scale the exponential linear unit (referred to as SELU) to inherently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-07-30 G. Zhang , H. Li

In the past decade, deep learning became the prevalent methodology for predictive modeling thanks to the remarkable accuracy of deep neural networks in tasks such as computer vision and natural language processing. Meanwhile, the structure…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-16 Joey Huchette , Gonzalo Muñoz , Thiago Serra , Calvin Tsay

Recent Progress has shown that exploitation of hidden layer neurons in convolution neural networks incorporating with a carefully designed activation function can yield better classification results in the field of computer vision. The…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2018-07-10 Zhi Chen , Pin-han Ho