In burst-mode communication systems, the quality of frame synchronization (FS) at receivers significantly impacts the overall system performance. To guarantee FS, an extreme learning machine (ELM)-based synchronization method is proposed to overcome the nonlinear distortion caused by nonlinear devices or blocks. In the proposed method, a preprocessing is first performed to capture the coarse features of synchronization metric (SM) by using empirical knowledge. Then, an ELM-based FS network is employed to reduce system's nonlinear distortion and improve SMs. Experimental results indicate that, compared with existing methods, our approach could significantly reduce the error probability of FS while improve the performance in terms of robustness and generalization.