Gaussian Error Linear Units

The Gaussian Error Linear Unit, or GELU, is an activation function. The GELU activation function is $x\Phi(x)$, where $\Phi(x)$ the standard Gaussian cumulative distribution function. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their percentile, rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs ($x\mathbf{1}_{x>0}$). Consequently the GELU can be thought of as a smoother ReLU.

$$\text{GELU}\left(x\right) = x{P}\left(X\leq{x}\right) = x\Phi\left(x\right) = x \cdot \frac{1}{2}\left[1 + \text{erf}(x/\sqrt{2})\right],$$ if $X\sim \mathcal{N}(0,1)$.

One can approximate the GELU with $0.5x\left(1+\tanh\left[\sqrt{2/\pi}\left(x + 0.044715x^{3}\right)\right]\right)$ or $x\sigma\left(1.702x\right),$ but PyTorch's exact implementation is sufficiently fast such that these approximations may be unnecessary. (See also the SiLU $x\sigma(x)$ which was also coined in the paper that introduced the GELU.)

GELUs are used in GPT-3, BERT, and most other Transformers.