# Tag Info

## Hot answers tagged activation-functions

Accepted

### What activation function does the human brain use?

The thing you were reading about is known as the action potential. It is a mechanism that governs how information flows within a neuron. It works like this: Neurons have an electrical potential, ...
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### How to choose an activation function for the hidden layers?

It seems to me that you already understand the shortcomings of ReLUs and sigmoids (like dead neurons in the case of plain ReLU). You may want to look at ELU (exponential linear units) and SELU (self-...
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### What does it mean for a neuron in a neural network to be activated?

A neuron is said activated when its output is more than a threshold, generally 0. For examples : $$y = Relu(a) > 0$$ when a = w^Tx+b > 0 \end{...
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### What is the purpose of an activation function in neural networks?

If you only had linear layers in a neural network, all the layers would essentially collapse to one linear layer, and, therefore, a "deep" neural network architecture effectively wouldn't be deep ...

### Are softmax outputs of classifiers true probabilities?

Excellent question. The simple answer is no. Softmax actually produces uncalibrated probabilities. That is, they do not really represent the probability of a prediction being correct. What usually ...
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### Are softmax outputs of classifiers true probabilities?

The answer is both yes, and no. Or, to put it another way, the answer depends on what exactly you mean by "represent probabilities", and there is a valid sense in which the answer is yes, ...
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### Do neurons of a neural network model a linear relationship?

In a neural network (NN), a neuron can act as a linear operator, but it usually acts as a non-linear one. The usual equation of a neuron $i$ in layer $l$ of an NN is o_i^l = \sigma(\mathbf{x}_i^l \...
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### Why is the derivative of the activation functions in neural networks important?

Consider a dataset $\mathcal{D}=\{x^{(i)},y^{(i)}:i=1,2,\ldots,N\}$ where $x^{(i)}\in\mathbb{R}^3$ and $y^{(i)}\in\mathbb{R}$ $\forall i$ The goal is to fit a function that best explains our dataset....
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### Why do ResNets avoid the vanishing gradient problem?

Before proceeding, it's important to note that ResNets, as pointed out here, were not introduced to specifically solve the VGP, but to improve learning in general. In fact, the authors of ResNet, in ...
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### Why is no activation function used at the final layer of super-resolution models?

I am not into the field of super-resolution, but I think this question applies to general neural network construction. Usually, you try to solve a classification problem or a regression problem with ...

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### What does it mean for a neuron in a neural network to be activated?

The term "activated" is mostly used when talking about activation functions which only outputs a value (except 0) when the input to the activation function is greater than a certain treshold. ...
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Consider a very simple neural network, with just 2 layers, where the first has 2 neurons and the last 1 neuron, and the input size is 2. The inputs are $x_1$ and $x_1$. The weights of the first layer ...