A Significantly Better Class of Activation Functions Than ReLU Like Activation Functions

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Noel, Mathew Mithra, Oswal, Yug
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Noel, Mathew Mithra
Oswal, Yug
author_facet Noel, Mathew Mithra
Oswal, Yug
contents This paper introduces a significantly better class of activation functions than the almost universally used ReLU like and Sigmoidal class of activation functions. Two new activation functions referred to as the Cone and Parabolic-Cone that differ drastically from popular activation functions and significantly outperform these on the CIFAR-10 and Imagenette benchmmarks are proposed. The cone activation functions are positive only on a finite interval and are strictly negative except at the end-points of the interval, where they become zero. Thus the set of inputs that produce a positive output for a neuron with cone activation functions is a hyperstrip and not a half-space as is the usual case. Since a hyper strip is the region between two parallel hyper-planes, it allows neurons to more finely divide the input feature space into positive and negative classes than with infinitely wide half-spaces. In particular the XOR function can be learn by a single neuron with cone-like activation functions. Both the cone and parabolic-cone activation functions are shown to achieve higher accuracies with significantly fewer neurons on benchmarks. The results presented in this paper indicate that many nonlinear real-world datasets may be separated with fewer hyperstrips than half-spaces. The Cone and Parabolic-Cone activation functions have larger derivatives than ReLU and are shown to significantly speedup training.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_04459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Significantly Better Class of Activation Functions Than ReLU Like Activation Functions
Noel, Mathew Mithra
Oswal, Yug
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
68T07
This paper introduces a significantly better class of activation functions than the almost universally used ReLU like and Sigmoidal class of activation functions. Two new activation functions referred to as the Cone and Parabolic-Cone that differ drastically from popular activation functions and significantly outperform these on the CIFAR-10 and Imagenette benchmmarks are proposed. The cone activation functions are positive only on a finite interval and are strictly negative except at the end-points of the interval, where they become zero. Thus the set of inputs that produce a positive output for a neuron with cone activation functions is a hyperstrip and not a half-space as is the usual case. Since a hyper strip is the region between two parallel hyper-planes, it allows neurons to more finely divide the input feature space into positive and negative classes than with infinitely wide half-spaces. In particular the XOR function can be learn by a single neuron with cone-like activation functions. Both the cone and parabolic-cone activation functions are shown to achieve higher accuracies with significantly fewer neurons on benchmarks. The results presented in this paper indicate that many nonlinear real-world datasets may be separated with fewer hyperstrips than half-spaces. The Cone and Parabolic-Cone activation functions have larger derivatives than ReLU and are shown to significantly speedup training.
title A Significantly Better Class of Activation Functions Than ReLU Like Activation Functions
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
68T07
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04459