In the last decade, an active area of research has been devoted to design
novel activation functions that are able to help deep neural networks to
converge, obtaining better performance. The training procedure of these
architectures usually involves optimization of the weights of their layers
only, while non-linearities are generally pre-specified and their (possible)
parameters are usually considered as hyper-parameters to be tuned manually. In
this paper, we introduce two approaches to automatically learn different
combinations of base activation functions (such as the identity function, ReLU,
and tanh) during the training phase. We present a thorough comparison of our
novel approaches with well-known architectures (such as LeNet-5, AlexNet, and
ResNet-56) on three standard datasets (Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and
ILSVRC-2012), showing substantial improvements in the overall performance, such
as an increase in the top-1 accuracy for AlexNet on ILSVRC-2012 of 3.01
percentage points.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures. Published as a conference paper at ICPR 2018.
Code:
https://bitbucket.org/francux/learning_combinations_of_activation_function