{"url":"/method/serf","slug":"serf","name":"Serf","full_name":"Serf","full_name_withheld":false,"description_markdown":"**Serf**, or **Log-Softplus ERror activation Function**, is a type of activation function which is self-regularized and nonmonotonic in nature. It belongs to the [Swish](https://paperswithcode.com/method/swish) family of functions. Serf is defined as:\r\n\r\n$$f\\left(x\\right) = x\\text{erf}\\left(\\ln\\left(1 + e^{x}\\right)\\right)$$","description_state":"present","introduced_year":null,"introduced_by":{"title":null,"paper":null,"first_author":null,"n_authors":0,"url_abs":null,"archive_paper_url":null},"source":{"url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.09598v3","title":"SERF: Towards better training of deep neural networks using log-Softplus ERror activation Function","url_on_a_paper_host":true},"code_snippet_url":null,"code_snippet_url_on_a_code_host":false,"categories":[{"area":"General","area_id":"general","collection":"Activation Functions","url":"/methods/category/activation-functions","pwc_aliases":[]}],"n_papers_tagged":3,"archive_num_papers":null,"papers_newest_first":[{"paper":null,"title":"ErfReLU: Adaptive Activation Function for Deep Neural Network","date":"2023-06-02","arxiv_id":"2306.01822","n_code_links":0,"syntology":null},{"paper":null,"title":"SERF: Interpretable Sleep Staging using Embeddings, Rules, and Features","date":"2022-09-21","arxiv_id":"2209.11174","n_code_links":0,"syntology":null},{"paper":null,"title":"SERF: Towards better training of deep neural networks using log-Softplus ERror activation Function","date":"2021-08-21","arxiv_id":"2108.09598","n_code_links":0,"syntology":null}],"papers_shown":3,"tasks":[{"task":"/task/image-classification","name":"Image Classification","papers":1},{"task":"/task/machine-translation","name":"Machine Translation","papers":1},{"task":"/task/object-detection","name":"Object Detection","papers":1},{"task":"/task/sentiment-analysis","name":"Sentiment Analysis","papers":1},{"task":"/task/sentiment-classification","name":"Sentiment Classification","papers":1},{"task":"/task/sleep-quality","name":"Sleep Quality","papers":1},{"task":"/task/sleep-staging","name":"Sleep Staging","papers":1},{"task":"/task/translation","name":"Translation","papers":1},{"task":"/task/image-classification","name":"image-classification","papers":1},{"task":"/task/object-detection-1","name":"object-detection","papers":1}],"tasks_shown":10,"n_tasks":10,"usage_by_year":[{"year":"2021","papers":1},{"year":"2022","papers":1},{"year":"2023","papers":1}],"row_source":"embedded","archive":{"source":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","archive_url":"https://paperswithcode.com/method/serf"},"syntology_read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00"}