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Kernel Activation Function

KAF

9 papers tagged archive 2025-07-28

Introduced by Simone Scardapane et al. in Kafnets: kernel-based non-parametric activation functions for neural networks

archive 2025-07-28 Description, source and code snippet are the archive's method entry.

A Kernel Activation Function is a non-parametric activation function defined as a one-dimensional kernel approximator:

f(s) = ∑ᵢ₌₁ᴰ αᵢ κ( s, dᵢ)

where:

  1. The dictionary of the kernel elements d₀, …, d_D is fixed by sampling the x-axis with a uniform step around 0.
  2. The user selects the kernel function (e.g., Gaussian, ReLU, Softplus) and the number of kernel elements D as a hyper-parameter. A larger dictionary leads to more expressive activation functions and a larger number of trainable parameters.
  3. The linear coefficients are adapted independently at every neuron via standard back-propagation.

In addition, the linear coefficients can be initialized using kernel ridge regression to behave similarly to a known function in the beginning of the optimization process.

PaperSourceSee Code · ispamm/kernel-activation-functions

Papers archive 2025-07-28

9 shown of 9, newest first. Repository counts are the archive's code-links table. A Syntology line states what Syntology ran from that paper's harvested code; it is per sample and not a correctness claim.

Tasks archive 2025-07-28

8 tasks the archive attaches to papers tagged with this method, by distinct papers. A task without a page in the catalog is plain text.

TaskPapers
Time Series3
Time Series Analysis3
Computational Efficiency1
Fairness1
Federated Learning1
Optical Character Recognition (OCR)1
Privacy Preserving1
regression1

Usage over time archive 2025-07-28

Papers per year tagged with KAF: 2017 to 2025, peak 2 2 0 2017: 2 papers 2017 2018: 0 papers 2018 2019: 1 paper 2019 2020: 0 papers 2020 2021: 1 paper 2021 2022: 1 paper 2022 2023: 1 paper 2023 2024: 1 paper 2024 2025: 2 papers 2025
Papers per year the archive tags with this method, by the paper's archive date (9 dated). Bars are counts, not a trend claim.

Components: the archive holds no method-to-method composition, so PwC's Components table cannot be rebuilt; the Papers list carries no Results column for the same reason (the archive does not join its leaderboard rows to method tags).

Categories archive 2025-07-28

Activation Functions

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