perceptron

A system (either hardware or software) that takes in one or more input values, runs a function on the weighted sum of the inputs, and computes a single output value. In machine learning, the function is typically nonlinear, such as ReLU, sigmoid, or tanh. For example, the following perceptron relies on the sigmoid function to process three input values:

In the following illustration, the perceptron takes three inputs, each of which is itself modified by a weight before entering the perceptron: Perceptrons are the neurons in neural networks.

Practitioners refer to perceptron when building, training, or evaluating machine learning systems. It appears in research papers, product documentation, and technical discussions about AI capabilities and limitations.