# Tanh Activation

> Source: https://sukruyusufkaya.com/en/glossary/tanh-activation
> Updated: 2026-05-13T21:00:25.169Z
> Type: glossary
> Category: derin-ogrenme
**TLDR:** A zero-centered activation function that maps inputs into the range from -1 to 1.

<p>The tanh activation behaves similarly to sigmoid in terms of saturation, but its zero-centered output can provide some optimization advantages. It was frequently used in older RNNs and sequence models. Because it carries both negative and positive values symmetrically, it can offer a more balanced representation in some hidden-state settings. Still, because of the vanishing-gradient issue in deep architectures, its use is more limited in many modern networks.</p>