A Non-monotonic Smooth Activation Function
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Abstract (arXiv)
Activation functions are crucial in deep learning models since they introduce non-linearity into the networks, allowing them to learn from errors and make adjustments, which is essential for learning complex patterns. The essential purpose of activation functions is to transform unprocessed input signals into significant output activations, promoting information transmission throughout the neural network. In this study, we propose a new activation function called Sqish, which is a non-monotonic and smooth function and an alternative to existing ones. We showed its superiority in classification, object detection, segmentation tasks, and adversarial robustness experiments. We got an 8.21% improvement over ReLU on the CIFAR100 dataset with the ShuffleNet V2 model in the FGSM adversarial attack. We also got a 5.87% improvement over ReLU on image classification on the CIFAR100 dataset with the ShuffleNet V2 model.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 27 of its 45 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.
Builds on
27 of 45 references.
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15 more
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 1; 2025: 2.
3 papers.
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- 2025Robustness as Architecture: Designing IQA Models to Withstand Adversarial Perturbations5 Jun 2025
- 2024Zorro: A Flexible and Differentiable Parametric Family of Activation Functions That Extends ReLU and GELU28 Sep 2024