Papers › Learning Activation Functions to Improve Deep Neural Networks
Learning Activation Functions to Improve Deep Neural Networks
Forest Agostinelli, Matthew Hoffman, Peter Sadowski, Pierre Baldi
Artificial neural networks typically have a fixed, non-linear activation function at each neuron. We have designed a novel form of piecewise linear activation function that is learned independently for each neuron using gradient descent. With this adaptive activation function, we are able to improve upon deep neural network architectures composed of static rectified linear units, achieving state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10 (7.51%), CIFAR-100 (30.83%), and a benchmark from high-energy physics involving Higgs boson decay modes.
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Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
| Task | Dataset | Model | Metric | Value | Rank at snapshot | Leaderboard | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Image Classification | CIFAR-10 | NiN+APL | Percentage correct | 92.5 | #180 of 265 | Archive leaderboard | report |
| Image Classification | CIFAR-100 | NiN+APL | Percentage correct | 69.2 | #177 of 211 | Archive leaderboard | report |
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