Empirical Loss Landscape Analysis of Neural Network Activation Functions
Anna Sergeevna Bosman Andries Engelbrecht Marde Helbig
Activation functions play a significant role in neural network design by
enabling non-linearity. The choice of activation function was previously shown
to influence the properties of the resulting loss landscape. Understanding the
relationship between activation functions and loss landscape properties is
important for neural architecture and training algorithm design. This study
empirically investigates neural network loss landscapes associated with
hyperbolic tangent, rectified linear unit, and exponential linear unit
activation functions. Rectified linear unit is shown to yield the most convex
loss landscape, and exponential linear unit is shown to yield the least flat
loss landscape, and to exhibit superior generalisation performance. The
presence of wide and narrow valleys in the loss landscape is established for
all activation functions, and the narrow valleys are shown to correlate with
saturated neurons and implicitly regularised network configurations.