Question

Which of the following activation function outputs is zero-centered?

• A. Hyperbolic tangent
• B. Sigmoid
• C. Softmax
• D. Rectified Linear Unit (ReLU)

Hint:

Use hyperbolic tangent (tanh) for zero-centered activations, especially in hidden layers, to improve optimization.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is A

The hyperbolic tangent (tanh) function outputs values in the range [−1, 1], establishing it as zero-centered. This attribute aids optimization by keeping the mean activation near zero. Unlike tanh, functions such as sigmoid, softmax, and ReLU are not zero-centered.