Definition: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
Input: Common activation functions used in neural networks can yield to training difficulties due to the saturation behavior of the activation function, which may hide dependencies which are not visible to first order (using only gradients). Gating mechanisms that use softly saturating activation functions to emulate the discrete switching of digital logic circuits are good examples of this. We propose to exploit the injection of appropriate noise so that some gradients may sometimes flow, even if the noiseless application of the activation function would yield zero gradient. Large noise will dominate the noise-free gradient and allow stochastic gradient descent to be more exploratory. By adding noise only to the problematic parts of the activation function we allow the optimization procedure to explore the boundary between the degenerate (saturating) and the well-behaved parts of the activation function. We also establish connections to simulated annealing, when the amount of noise is annealed down, making it easier to optimize hard objective functions. We find experimentally that replacing such saturating activation functions by by noisy variants helps training in many contexts, yielding state-of-the-art results on several datasets, especially when training seems to be the most difficult, e.g., when curriculum learning is necessary to obtain good results.

Noisy Activation Functions