Papers › Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network
Empirical Evaluation of Rectified Activations in Convolutional Network
Bing Xu, Naiyan Wang, Tianqi Chen, Mu Li
In this paper we investigate the performance of different types of rectified activation functions in convolutional neural network: standard rectified linear unit (ReLU), leaky rectified linear unit (Leaky ReLU), parametric rectified linear unit (PReLU) and a new randomized leaky rectified linear units (RReLU). We evaluate these activation function on standard image classification task. Our experiments suggest that incorporating a non-zero slope for negative part in rectified activation units could consistently improve the results. Thus our findings are negative on the common belief that sparsity is the key of good performance in ReLU. Moreover, on small scale dataset, using deterministic negative slope or learning it are both prone to overfitting. They are not as effective as using their randomized counterpart. By using RReLU, we achieved 75.68% accuracy on CIFAR-100 test set without multiple test or ensemble.
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Code
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Tasks
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | CIFAR-10 | RReLU | Percentage correct | 88.8 | #214 of 265 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Classification | CIFAR-100 | RReLU | Percentage correct | 59.8 | #201 of 211 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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Methods
Introduced by this paper: RReLU
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