Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)

Abstract

We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU activation function is $xΦ(x)$, where $Φ(x)$ the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their value, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs ($x\mathbf{1}_{x>0}$). We perform an empirical evaluation of the GELU nonlinearity against the ReLU and ELU activations and find performance improvements across all considered computer vision, natural language processing, and speech tasks.