Activation functions enable neural networks to learn complex representations by introducing non-linearities. While feedforward models commonly use rectified linear units, sequential models like recurrent neural networks, long short-term memory (LSTMs) and gated recurrent units (GRUs) still rely on Sigmoid and TanH activation functions. However, these classical activation functions often struggle to model sparse patterns when trained on small sequential datasets to effectively capture temporal dependencies. To address this limitation, we propose squared Sigmoid TanH (SST) activation specifically tailored to enhance the learning capability of sequential models under data constraints. SST applies mathematical squaring to amplify differences between strong and weak activations as signals propagate over time, facilitating improved gradient flow and information filtering. We evaluate SST-powered LSTMs and GRUs for diverse applications, such as sign language recognition, regression, and time-series classification tasks, where the dataset is limited. Our experiments demonstrate that SST models consistently outperform RNN-based models with baseline activations, exhibiting improved test accuracy.

Activation function is a pivotal component of deep learning, facilitating the extraction of intricate data patterns. While classical activation functions like ReLU and its variants are extensively utilized, their static nature and simplicity, despite being advantageous, often limit their effectiveness in specialized tasks. The trainable activation functions also struggle sometimes to adapt to the unique characteristics of the data. Addressing these limitations, we introduce a novel trainable activation function, adaptive piecewise approximated activation linear unit (APALU), to enhance the learning performance of deep learning across a broad range of tasks. It presents a unique set of features that enable it to maintain stability and efficiency in the learning process while adapting to complex data representations. Experiments reveal significant improvements over widely used activation functions for different tasks. In image classification, APALU increases MobileNet and GoogleNet accuracy by 0.37% and 0.04%, respectively, on the CIFAR10 dataset. In anomaly detection, it improves the average area under the curve of One-CLASS Deep SVDD by 0.8% on the MNIST dataset, 1.81% and 1.11% improvements with DifferNet, and knowledge distillation, respectively, on the MVTech dataset. Notably, APALU achieves 100% accuracy on a sign language recognition task with a limited dataset. For regression tasks, APALU enhances the performance of deep neural networks and recurrent neural networks on different datasets. These improvements highlight the robustness and adaptability of APALU across diverse deep-learning applications.

Relation extraction (RE) aims to identify the semantic relations between named entities in text. Recent years have witnessed it raised to the document level, which requires complex reasoning with entities and mentions throughout an entire document. In this paper, we propose a novel model to document-level RE, by encoding the document information in terms of entity global and local representations as well as context relation representations. Entity global representations model the semantic information of all entities in the document, entity local representations aggregate the contextual information of multiple mentions of specific entities, and context relation representations encode the topic information of other relations. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves superior performance on two public datasets for document-level RE. It is particularly effective in extracting relations between entities of long distance and having multiple mentions.

After spending more than a year on a waiting list for a functional prosthetic hand, a Texas girl's needs were met by her local public library-- which happens to have a 3-D printing lab. Katelyn Vincik, 5, was born with a left hand that wasn't fully formed, but hasn't let that difference slow her down, Click 2 Houston reported. "She's very determined, she does everything," her mother, Kimberly Vincik, told the news channel. "It's never held her back." But during her nightly prayers, Katelyn always asks when the doctors will fix her hand.