Stochastic activations

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20032 Authors

Keywords: activation functions, sparsity, generation

TL;DR: We introduce stochastic activations, where we randomly select between several non-linear function in the feed-forward layer of a large language model.

Abstract:

We introduce stochastic activations. This novel strategy randomly selects between several non-linear functions in the feed-forward layer of a large language model. In particular, we choose between SILU or RELU depending on a Bernoulli draw. This strategy circumvents the optimization problem associated with RELU, namely, the constant shape for negative inputs that prevents the gradient flow. We leverage this strategy in two ways:

(1) We use stochastic activations during pre-training and fine-tune the model with RELU, which is used at inference time to provide sparse latent vectors. This reduces the inference FLOPs and translates into a significant speedup in the CPU. Interestingly, this leads to much better results than training from scratch with the \relu activation function.

(2) We evaluate stochastic activations for generation. This strategy performs reasonably well: it is only slightly inferior to the best deterministic non-linearity, namely SILU combined with temperature scaling. This offers an alternative to existing strategies by providing a controlled way to increase the diversity of the generated text.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 20032