Beyond Affine Transformations: A Soft Dominance Layer for Coordinate-Wise Neural Computation

Excerpt

arXiv:2610.00563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper presents a preliminary study of an alternative to the affine transformation underlying conventional neural-network layers. In the proposed Soft Dominance Layer, each output unit compares input coordinates with a learnable reference vector and aggregates smooth inequality responses. A sigmoid relaxation makes the comparisons differentiable, while a sharpness parameter $\alpha$ controls their transition toward hard threshold decisions. The