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LoTAS: A Novel Activation Function for Deep Neural Networks

2025· article· W4417170031 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicStochastic Gradient Optimization Techniques
Canadian institutionsInstitut National de la Recherche ScientifiqueNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada
Fundersnot available
KeywordsActivation functionResidualSmoothnessArtificial neural networkNormalization (sociology)Deep neural networksBalanced flowStability (learning theory)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Despite progress in deep learning, activation functions remain crucial for optimizing gradient flow and representation. Conventional functions such as ReLU and Swish still face limitations in gradient smoothness and stability near zero and extremes. This paper introduces LoTAS (Logarithmic-Tanh with Asymmetry and residual Skip), a novel activation integrating a logarithmically regulated tanh, a gated mechanism, and a learnable residual path. LoTAS enhances gradient dynamics, promotes stable convergence, and maintains compatibility with batch normalization in both shallow and deep architectures. Comprehensive benchmarks show consistent gains over ReLU and Swish in convergence speed, stability, and adaptability.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.712
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.002
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.019
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.239 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it