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Technical GlossaryDeep Learning

ELU

An activation function that uses smooth exponential behavior in the negative region to encourage a more balanced activation distribution.

ELU uses a smooth exponential structure in the negative region instead of hard zeroing, which can help produce a more balanced distribution of activations. This may allow representations to behave closer to being zero-centered and can facilitate learning in some cases. Although slightly more expensive than ReLU computationally, it may offer more stable optimization in certain architectures.