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Related papers: Effectiveness of MPC-friendly Softmax Replacement

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This paper questions whether the strong performance of softmax attention in transformers stems from producing a probability distribution over inputs. Instead, we argue that softmax's effectiveness lies in its implicit regularization of the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hemanth Saratchandran , Jianqiao Zheng , Yiping Ji , Wenbo Zhang , Simon Lucey

The Softmax loss is one of the most widely employed surrogate objectives for classification and ranking tasks. To elucidate its theoretical properties, the Fenchel-Young framework situates it as a canonical instance within a broad family of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yuanhao Pu , Defu Lian , Enhong Chen

Non-local (NL) block is a popular module that demonstrates the capability to model global contexts. However, NL block generally has heavy computation and memory costs, so it is impractical to apply the block to high-resolution feature maps.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-07-28 Yooshin Cho , Youngsoo Kim , Hanbyel Cho , Jaesung Ahn , Hyeong Gwon Hong , Junmo Kim

We study the tradeoff between computational effort and classification accuracy in a cascade of deep neural networks. During inference, the user sets the acceptable accuracy degradation which then automatically determines confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-12 Konstantin Berestizshevsky , Guy Even

Learning complicated value functions in high dimensional state space by function approximation is a challenging task, partially due to that the max-operator used in temporal difference updates can theoretically cause instability for most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-21 Yaozhong Gan , Zhe Zhang , Xiaoyang Tan

Softmax is the most commonly used output function for multiclass problems and is widely used in areas such as vision, natural language processing, and recommendation. A softmax model has linear costs in the number of classes which makes it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-08-03 Guy Blanc , Steffen Rendle

Large language models (LLMs) have made transformed changes for human society. One of the key computation in LLMs is the softmax unit. This operation is important in LLMs because it allows the model to generate a distribution over possible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Yichuan Deng , Zhihang Li , Zhao Song

The softmax function is a fundamental component in deep learning. This study delves into the often-overlooked parameter within the softmax function, known as "temperature," providing novel insights into the practical and theoretical aspects…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Hao Xuan , Bokai Yang , Xingyu Li

We propose an approximate strategy to efficiently train neural network based language models over very large vocabularies. Our approach, called adaptive softmax, circumvents the linear dependency on the vocabulary size by exploiting the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-20 Edouard Grave , Armand Joulin , Moustapha Cissé , David Grangier , Hervé Jégou

A softmax operator applied to a set of values acts somewhat like the maximization function and somewhat like an average. In sequential decision making, softmax is often used in settings where it is necessary to maximize utility but also to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-06-15 Kavosh Asadi , Michael L. Littman

Deep neural networks (DNNs) provide state-of-the-art results on various tasks and are widely used in real world applications. However, it was discovered that machine learning models, including the best performing DNNs, suffer from a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Andras Rozsa , Manuel Günther , Terrance E. Boult

Many applications of generative models rely on the marginalization of their high-dimensional output probability distributions. Normalization functions that yield sparse probability distributions can make exact marginalization more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-28 Phil Chen , Masha Itkina , Ransalu Senanayake , Mykel J. Kochenderfer

Ensembling multiple predictions is a widely used technique for improving the accuracy of various machine learning tasks. One obvious drawback of ensembling is its higher execution cost during inference. In this paper, we first describe our…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-11 Hiroshi Inoue

We consider learning a probabilistic classifier from partially-labelled supervision (inputs denoted with multiple possibilities) using standard neural architectures with a softmax as the final layer. We identify a bias phenomenon that can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Zsolt Zombori , Agapi Rissaki , Kristóf Szabó , Wolfgang Gatterbauer , Michael Benedikt

Deep classifiers have achieved great success in visual recognition. However, real-world data is long-tailed by nature, leading to the mismatch between training and testing distributions. In this paper, we show that the Softmax function,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-24 Jiawei Ren , Cunjun Yu , Shunan Sheng , Xiao Ma , Haiyu Zhao , Shuai Yi , Hongsheng Li

Transformer models have gained significant attention due to their power in machine learning tasks. Their extensive deployment has raised concerns about the potential leakage of sensitive information during inference. However, when being…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Zhengyi Li , Kang Yang , Jin Tan , Wen-jie Lu , Haoqi Wu , Xiao Wang , Yu Yu , Derun Zhao , Yancheng Zheng , Minyi Guo , Jingwen Leng

Modern machine learning forces practitioners to choose between powerful but expensive deep networks and fast but limited classical algorithms. Here we introduce Soft Learning, a framework that maintains a library of heterogeneous…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mohammed Aledhari , Ali Aledhari , Fatimah Aledhari , Mohamed Rahouti

Learning distributed representations, or embeddings, that encode the relational similarity patterns among objects is a relevant task in machine learning. A popular method to learn the embedding matrices $X, Y$ is optimizing a loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Lorenzo Dall'Amico , Enrico Maria Belliardo

As the performance gains from accelerating quantized matrix multiplication plateau, the softmax operation becomes the critical bottleneck in Transformer inference. This bottleneck stems from two hardware limitations: (1) limited data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Zisheng Ye , Xiaoyu He , Maoyuan Song , Guoliang Qiu , Chao Liao , Chen Wu , Yonggang Sun , Zhichun Li , Xiaoru Xie , Yuanyong Luo , Hu Liu , Pinyan Lu , Heng Liao

In deep learning classifiers, the cost function usually takes the form of a combination of SoftMax and CrossEntropy functions. The SoftMax unit transforms the scores predicted by the model network into assessments of the degree…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-29 Wladyslaw Skarbek