3min chapter

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis cover image

E39: Seeing is Believing with MIT’s Ziming Liu

"The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis

CHAPTER

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Smooth Activations

With silu or salu, this kind of smooth functions, you can construct like quadratic functions with just two or three neurons. But in practice, what really happens is that neural networks have two neurons. Both neurons have their own first order terms, but somehow in the later layers, they weighted them such that their first order terms cancel each other. The second order term survives in tail expansion. So it's a little bit shocking to me, like in some sense, neural networks are more clever than myself. It's my unreasonable craze for silu or Salu.

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