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arXiv · 2606.20292

Shifting-based Optimizable Linear Relaxations for General Activation Functions

Philipp Kern·László Antal·Erika Ábráham·Carsten Sinz
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Abstract

The use of neural networks (NNs) is rapidly increasing, including in safety- and security-critical domains. To provide formal guarantees about NN behavior, many verification methods rely on optimizable linear relaxations of activation functions. However, existing techniques depend on hand-crafted relaxations for each activation function. Extension to state-of-the-art activation functions therefore requires substantial manual effort. In contrast, our approach SLiR (Shifting-based Linear Relaxations) is broadly applicable, requiring only a Lipschitz constant or a set of critical points. SLiR parameterizes relaxations by their slope and computes the corresponding offset via a shifting procedure that ensures sound upper and lower bounds over the input domain, enabling efficient optimization while maintaining correctness. Our experiments show that SLiR produces tight relaxations across a wide range of practical activation functions and enables verification of up to 7.8x more properties compared to state-of-the-art methods.

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Philipp Kern, László Antal, Erika Ábráham, Carsten Sinz. 2026-06-18. Shifting-based Optimizable Linear Relaxations for General Activation Functions. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.20292

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