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The softmax function is a basic operator in machine learning and optimization, used in classification, attention mechanisms, reinforcement learning, game theory, and problems involving log-sum-exp terms. Existing robustness guarantees of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Pravin Nair

The softmax function is crucial in Transformer attention, which normalizes each row of the attention scores with summation to one, achieving superior performances over other alternative functions. However, the softmax function can face a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Chuanyang Zheng , Yihang Gao , Guoxuan Chen , Han Shi , Jing Xiong , Xiaozhe Ren , Chao Huang , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Yu Li

Softmax function is widely used in artificial neural networks for multiclass classification, multilabel classification, attention mechanisms, etc. However, its efficacy is often questioned in literature. The log-softmax loss has been shown…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Kunal Banerjee , Vishak Prasad C , Rishi Raj Gupta , Karthik Vyas , Anushree H , Biswajit Mishra

Large language models rely on attention mechanisms with a softmax activation. Yet the dominance of softmax over alternatives (e.g., component-wise or linear) remains poorly understood, and many theoretical works have focused on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-27 O. Duranthon , P. Marion , C. Boyer , B. Loureiro , L. Zdeborová

The maximum element of the vector output by the Softmax function approaches zero as the input vector size increases. Transformer-based language models rely on Softmax to compute attention scores, causing the attention distribution to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Ken M. Nakanishi

A widely-used actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithm for continuous control, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients (DDPG), suffers from the overestimation problem, which can negatively affect the performance. Although the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-20 Ling Pan , Qingpeng Cai , Longbo Huang

While transformer models exhibit strong in-context learning (ICL) abilities, they often fail to generalize under simple distribution shifts. We analyze these failures and identify Softmax, the scoring function in the attention mechanism, as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Omar Naim , Swarnadeep Bhar , Jérôme Bolte , Nicholas Asher

Mobile robots are increasingly being employed for performing complex tasks in dynamic environments. Reinforcement learning (RL) methods are recognized to be promising for specifying such tasks in a relatively simple manner. However, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-08 Angel Martínez-Tenor , Juan Antonio Fernández-Madrigal , Ana Cruz-Martín , Javier González-Jiménez

Normalization methods improve both optimization and generalization of ConvNets. To further boost performance, the recently-proposed switchable normalization (SN) provides a new perspective for deep learning: it learns to select different…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Wenqi Shao , Tianjian Meng , Jingyu Li , Ruimao Zhang , Yudian Li , Xiaogang Wang , Ping Luo

SARSA, a classical on-policy control algorithm for reinforcement learning, is known to chatter when combined with linear function approximation: SARSA does not diverge but oscillates in a bounded region. However, little is known about how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-16 Shangtong Zhang , Remi Tachet , Romain Laroche

Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-08 Ruihan Yang , Huazhe Xu , Yi Wu , Xiaolong Wang

This paper presents a neural network optimizer with soft-argmax operator to achieve an ecological gearshift strategy in real-time. The strategy is reformulated as the mixed-integer model predictive control (MIMPC) problem to minimize energy…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-02-29 Xi Luo , Shiying Dong , Jinlong Hong , Bingzhao Gao , Hong Chen

Robust Reinforcement Learning aims to derive optimal behavior that accounts for model uncertainty in dynamical systems. However, previous studies have shown that by considering the worst case scenario, robust policies can be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-10-25 Esther Derman , Daniel J. Mankowitz , Timothy A. Mann , Shie Mannor

SARSA is an on-policy algorithm to learn a Markov decision process policy in reinforcement learning. We investigate the SARSA algorithm with linear function approximation under the non-i.i.d.\ data, where a single sample trajectory is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-20 Shaofeng Zou , Tengyu Xu , Yingbin Liang

The softmax representation of probabilities for categorical variables plays a prominent role in modern machine learning with numerous applications in areas such as large scale classification, neural language modeling and recommendation…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2016-11-01 Michalis K. Titsias

The softmax function is a fundamental building block of deep neural networks, commonly used to define output distributions in classification tasks or attention weights in transformer architectures. Despite its widespread use and proven…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Wojciech Masarczyk , Mateusz Ostaszewski , Tin Sum Cheng , Tomasz Trzciński , Aurelien Lucchi , Razvan Pascanu

Softmax is widely used in deep learning to map some representation to a probability distribution. As it is based on exp/log functions that are relatively expensive in multi-party computation, Mohassel and Zhang (2017) proposed a simpler…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-07 Marcel Keller , Ke Sun

Transformer-based architectures traditionally employ softmax to compute attention weights, which produces dense distributions over all tokens in a sequence. While effective in many settings, this density has been shown to be detrimental for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Pavlo Vasylenko , Hugo Pitorro , André F. T. Martins , Marcos Treviso

In deep learning-based classification tasks, the softmax function's temperature parameter $T$ critically influences the output distribution and overall performance. This study presents a novel theoretical insight that the optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Tatsuhito Hasegawa , Shunsuke Sakai

The Softmax function is ubiquitous in machine learning, multiple previous works suggested faster alternatives for it. In this paper we propose a way to compute classical Softmax with fewer memory accesses and hypothesize that this reduction…

Performance · Computer Science 2018-07-31 Maxim Milakov , Natalia Gimelshein