cs.CVFeb 18, 2026

Subtractive Modulative Network with Learnable Periodic Activations

Authors: Tiou Wang, Zhuoqian Yang, Markus Flierl, Mathieu Salzmann, Sabine Süsstrunk

Organizations: School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden · School of Computer and Communication Sciences, EPFL, Switzerland

Abstract

We propose the Subtractive Modulative Network (SMN), a novel, parameter-efficient Implicit Neural Representation (INR) architecture inspired by classical subtractive synthesis. The SMN is designed as a principled signal processing pipeline, featuring a learnable periodic activation layer (Oscillator) that generates a multi-frequency basis, and a series of modulative mask modules (Filters) that actively generate high-order harmonics. We provide both theoretical analysis and empirical validation for our design. Our SMN achieves a PSNR of 40+40+ dB on two image datasets, comparing favorably against state-of-the-art methods in terms of both reconstruction accuracy and parameter efficiency. Furthermore, consistent advantage is observed on the challenging 3D NeRF novel view synthesis task. Supplementary materials are available at https://inrainbws.github.io/smn/.

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