Universal Smoothness via Bernstein Polynomials: A Constructive Approximation Approach for Activation Functions
The efficacy of deep neural networks is heavily reliant on the design of non-linear activation functions, yet existing approaches often struggle to balance optimization stability with computational efficiency. While piecewise linear functions offer inference speed, they suffer from optimization instability due to non-differentiability at the origin, whereas smooth counterparts typically incur significant computational overhead through their reliance on transcendental operations. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a general smoothing framework based on constructive approximation theory and introduces the Bernstein Linear Unit (BerLU). This novel activation function utilizes Bernstein polynomials to construct a differentiable quadratic transition region that effectively eliminates singularities while maintaining a piecewise linear structure. Theoretical analysis demonstrates that the proposed method guarantees strictly continuous differentiability and a non-expansive Lipschitz constant of one, which ensures stable gradient propagation and prevents the gradient explosion problems common in deep architectures. Comprehensive empirical evaluations across representative Vision Transformer and Convolutional Neural Network architectures confirm that this approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on standard image classification benchmarks while delivering superior computational and memory efficiency.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Computational EfficiencyImage ClassificationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Approximation of functions with one-bit neural networks
The celebrated universal approximation theorems for neural networks roughly state that any reasonable function can be arbitrarily well-approximated by a network whose parameters are appropriately chosen real numbers. Thi…
QuantizationPowerNet: Efficient Representations of Polynomials and Smooth Functions by Deep Neural Networks with Rectified Power Units
Deep neural network with rectified linear units (ReLU) is getting more and more popular recently. However, the derivatives of the function represented by a ReLU network are not continuous, which limit the usage of ReLU n…
Robust normalizing flows using Bernstein-type polynomials
Modeling real-world distributions can often be challenging due to sample data that are subjected to perturbations, e.g., instrumentation errors, or added random noise. Since flow models are typically nonlinear algorithms…
Vocal Bursts Type PredictionNon-asymptotic Approximation Error Bounds of Parameterized Quantum Circuits
Parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs) have emerged as a promising approach for quantum neural networks. However, understanding their expressive power in accomplishing machine learning tasks remains a crucial question. Th…
Quantum Machine LearningConstructive sparse trigonometric approximation for functions with small mixed smoothness
The paper gives a constructive method, based on greedy algorithms, that provides for the classes of functions with small mixed smoothness the best possible in the sense of order approximation error for the $m$-term appro…