About Lesson
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Activation Functions:
- Activation functions introduce non-linearity to neural networks. Without them, the entire network would behave like a linear regression model, which is quite limited in its representation capabilities.
- The three activation functions you mentioned are commonly used:
- Identity Function: This function simply passes the input through unchanged. As you mentioned, it doesn’t add any new expressive power to the network.
- Step Function: The step function produces binary outputs (ON/OFF) based on whether the linear combination exceeds a threshold. While simple, it’s rarely used due to its discontinuity and lack of differentiability.
- Sigmoid Function: The sigmoid function smoothly maps any real-valued input to a range between 0 and 1. It’s useful for binary classification tasks and as an activation in the output layer for probabilities.
- Other popular activation functions include ReLU (Rectified Linear Unit), Leaky ReLU, and Tanh.
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Output Interpretation:
- The output of a neuron, after passing through the activation function, represents the neuron’s activation level. In a classification task, this activation can indicate the confidence that the input belongs to a particular class.
- For instance, in self-driving cars, a neural network might process camera images to identify objects. If the output neuron corresponding to “stop sign” has a high activation, it triggers the stopping procedure.
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Learning and Adaptation:
- Neural networks learn by adjusting their weights during training. The goal is to minimize the difference between predicted outputs and ground truth labels.
- Optimization algorithms (like gradient descent) update weights based on the loss function. The network learns to produce correct outputs by iteratively adjusting these weights.
- You’re right that large networks with billions of weights require substantial computational resources for optimization.
Remember, neural networks are powerful tools, but they also come with challenges related to interpretability, fairness, and robustness.
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