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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

Recent neural network and language models rely on softmax distributions with an extremely large number of categories. Since calculating the softmax normalizing constant in this context is prohibitively expensive, there is a growing…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-03-26 Francois Fagan , Garud Iyengar

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 on top of a final linear layer is the de facto method to output probability distributions in neural networks. In many applications such as language models or text generation, this model has to produce distributions over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Octavian-Eugen Ganea , Sylvain Gelly , Gary Bécigneul , Aliaksei Severyn

The softmax function is a cornerstone of multi-class classification, integral to a wide range of machine learning applications, from large-scale retrieval and ranking models to advanced large language models. However, its computational cost…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Jin Chen , Jin Zhang , Xu huang , Yi Yang , Defu Lian , Enhong Chen

We propose DropMax, a stochastic version of softmax classifier which at each iteration drops non-target classes according to dropout probabilities adaptively decided for each instance. Specifically, we overlay binary masking variables over…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-05 Hae Beom Lee , Juho Lee , Saehoon Kim , Eunho Yang , Sung Ju Hwang

Despite great popularity of applying softmax to map the non-normalised outputs of a neural network to a probability distribution over predicting classes, this normalised exponential transformation still seems to be artificial. A theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Zhenyue Qin , Dongwoo Kim

The softmax function is a widely used activation function in the output layers of neural networks, responsible for converting raw scores into class probabilities while introducing essential non-linearity. Implementing Softmax efficiently…

Normalization is a vital process for any machine learning task as it controls the properties of data and affects model performance at large. The impact of particular forms of normalization, however, has so far been investigated in limited…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-22 Chintan Trivedi , Konstantinos Makantasis , Antonios Liapis , Georgios N. Yannakakis

Attention mechanisms have become ubiquitous in NLP. Recent architectures, notably the Transformer, learn powerful context-aware word representations through layered, multi-headed attention. The multiple heads learn diverse types of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-09-09 Gonçalo M. Correia , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

The Softmax function is used in the final layer of nearly all existing sequence-to-sequence models for language generation. However, it is usually the slowest layer to compute which limits the vocabulary size to a subset of most frequent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-03-25 Sachin Kumar , Yulia Tsvetkov

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

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

In meta-analysis, the random-effects models are standard tools to address between-study heterogeneity in evidence synthesis analyses. For the random-effects distribution models, the normal distribution model has been adopted in most…

Applications · Statistics 2021-07-28 Hisashi Noma , Kengo Nagashima , Shogo Kato , Satoshi Teramukai , Toshi A. Furukawa

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

Neural networks utilize the softmax as a building block in classification tasks, which contains an overconfidence problem and lacks an uncertainty representation ability. As a Bayesian alternative to the softmax, we consider a random…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Taejong Joo , Uijung Chung , Min-Gwan Seo

Neural networks and other machine learning models compute continuous representations, while humans communicate mostly through discrete symbols. Reconciling these two forms of communication is desirable for generating human-readable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-14 António Farinhas , Wilker Aziz , Vlad Niculae , André F. T. Martins

The computational cost of training with softmax cross entropy loss grows linearly with the number of classes. For the settings where a large number of classes are involved, a common method to speed up training is to sample a subset of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-01-01 Ankit Singh Rawat , Jiecao Chen , Felix Yu , Ananda Theertha Suresh , Sanjiv Kumar

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

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