提出新型激活函数IGLU,用柯西分布门控提升梯度稳定性与模型性能。
IGLU: The Integrated Gaussian Linear Unit Activation Function
- 基于半正态混合推导出带柯西门控的参数化激活函数
- 在图像与语言任务中表现优于或媲美ReLU/GELU,尤其在不平衡数据上优势明显
- 提供仅由ReLU构成的近似版本,计算效率更高
激活函数是深度神经网络的核心,影响梯度流动、优化稳定性和表征能力。尽管ReLU长期主导,现代Transformer模型越来越多采用GELU等平滑替代方案。然而这些函数的数学关系及其有效性原理仍不明确。本文提出IGLU,一种通过半正态混合分布导出的参数化激活函数,其门控部分恰好为柯西累积分布函数(CDF),形成可连续插值恒等与ReLU行为的一参数族,由单一尖锐度参数σ控制。相较于GELU的高斯门控,IGLU的重尾柯西门控在负向尾部呈多项式衰减,保证所有有限输入下梯度非零,显著提升对梯度消失的鲁棒性。进一步提出IGLU-Approx,一种完全由ReLU运算表达的有理逼近,避免超越函数计算。在CIFAR-10、CIFAR-100和WikiText-103上,基于ResNet-20、ViT-Tiny和GPT-2 Small的实验表明,IGLU在视觉与语言任务中表现竞争或更优,而IGLU-Approx以极低计算成本恢复相近性能。尤其在严重不平衡分类数据集上,重尾门控带来显著性能提升。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Activation functions are fundamental to deep neural networks, governing gradient flow, optimization stability, and representational capacity. Within historic deep architectures, while ReLU has been the dominant choice for the activation function, modern transformer-based models increasingly are adopting smoother alternatives such as GELU and other self-gated alternatives. Despite their empirical success, the mathematical relationships among these functions and the principles underlying their effectiveness remains only partially understood. We introduce IGLU, a parametric activation function derived as a scale mixture of GELU gates under a half-normal mixing distribution. This derivation yields a closed-form expression whose gating component is exactly the Cauchy CDF, providing a principled one-parameter family that continuously interpolates between identity-like and ReLU-like behavior via a single sharpness parameter $σ$. Unlike GELU's Gaussian gate, IGLU's heavy-tailed Cauchy gate decays polynomially in the negative tail, guaranteeing non-zero gradients for all finite inputs and offering greater robustness to vanishing gradients. We further introduce IGLU-Approx, a computationally efficient rational approximation of IGLU expressed entirely in terms of ReLU operations that eliminates transcendental function evaluation. Through evaluations on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and WikiText-103 across ResNet-20, ViT-Tiny, and GPT-2 Small, IGLU achieves competitive or superior performance on both vision and language datasets against ReLU and GELU baselines, with IGLU-Approx recovering this performance at substantially reduced computational cost. In particular, we show that employing a heavy-tailed gate leads to considerable performance gains in heavily imbalanced classification datasets.
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