# ReCA: A Parametric ReLU Composite Activation Function

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08994 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08994/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Delving Deep into Rectifiers: Surpassing Human-Level Performance on ImageNet Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.01852/) (2015)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Fast and Accurate Deep Network Learning by Exponential Linear Units (ELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07289/) (2015)
- [Self-Normalizing Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02515/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Activation functions have been shown to affect the performance of deep neural networks significantly. While the Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU) remains the dominant choice in practice, the optimal activation function for deep neural networks remains an open research question. In this paper, we propose a novel parametric activation function, ReCA, based on ReLU, which has been shown to outperform all baselines on state-of-the-art datasets using different complex neural network architectures.