We propose the Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neural network activation function. The GELU nonlinearity is the expected transformation of a stochastic regularizer which randomly applies the identity or zero map to a neuron's input. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their magnitude, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs. 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.

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In this paper we establish rigorous benchmarks for image classifier robustness. Our first benchmark, IMAGENET-C, standardizes and expands the corruption robustness topic, while showing which classifiers are preferable in safety-critical applications. Then we propose a new dataset called IMAGENET-P which enables researchers to benchmark a classifier's robustness to common perturbations. Unlike recent robustness research, this benchmark evaluates performance on common corruptions and perturbations not worst-case adversarial perturbations. We find that there are negligible changes in relative corruption robustness from AlexNet classifiers to ResNet classifiers. Afterward we discover ways to enhance corruption and perturbation robustness. We even find that a bypassed adversarial defense provides substantial common perturbation robustness. Together our benchmarks may aid future work toward networks that robustly generalize.

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