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arXiv · 2509.22358

Stochastic activations

Maria Lomeli·Matthijs Douze·Gergely Szilvasy·Loic Cabannes·Jade Copet·Sainbayar Sukhbaatar·Jason Weston·Gabriel Synnaeve·Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré·Hervé Jégou
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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 on CPU and GPU. This leads to better results than training from scratch with the RELU activation function. (2) We evaluate stochastic activations for sequence generation. This strategy performs reasonably well: it has higher diversity and has only slightly inferior performance to the best deterministic non-linearity, SILU, combined with temperature sampling. This provides an alternative way to increase the diversity of generated text.

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Maria Lomeli, Matthijs Douze, Gergely Szilvasy, Loic Cabannes, Jade Copet, Sainbayar Sukhbaatar, Jason Weston, Gabriel Synnaeve, Pierre-Emmanuel Mazaré, Hervé Jégou. 2025-12-24. Stochastic activations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22358

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