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Related papers: Cross-Entropy Loss Functions: Theoretical Analysis…

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This paper illustrates the central role of loss functions in data-driven decision making, providing a comprehensive survey on their influence in cost-sensitive classification (CSC) and reinforcement learning (RL). We demonstrate how…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-04-07 Kaiwen Wang , Nathan Kallus , Wen Sun

Cross-entropy loss has long been the standard choice for training deep neural networks, yet it suffers from interpretability limitations, unbounded weight growth, and inefficiencies that can contribute to costly training dynamics. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Maxwell Miller-Golub , Collin Coil , Kamil Faber , Marcin Pietron , Panpan Zheng , Pasquale Minervini , Roberto Corizzo

We introduce a novel loss function for training deep learning architectures to perform classification. It consists in minimizing the smoothness of label signals on similarity graphs built at the output of the architecture. Equivalently, it…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-02 Myriam Bontonou , Carlos Lassance , Ghouthi Boukli Hacene , Vincent Gripon , Jian Tang , Antonio Ortega

The adversarial vulnerability of deep neural networks (DNNs) has been actively investigated in the past several years. This paper investigates the scale-variant property of cross-entropy loss, which is the most commonly used loss function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-12 Ziquan Liu , Antoni B. Chan

Many loss functions have been derived from cross-entropy loss functions such as large-margin softmax loss and focal loss. The large-margin softmax loss makes the classification more rigorous and prevents overfitting. The focal loss…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Jiajie Chen

The concept of Entropy plays a key role in Information Theory, Statistics, and Machine Learning.This paper introduces a new entropy measure, called the t-entropy, which exploits the concavity of the inverse-tan function. We analytically…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-06 Saptarshi Chakraborty , Debolina Paul , Swagatam Das

We present a detailed study of surrogate losses and algorithms for multi-label learning, supported by $H$-consistency bounds. We first show that, for the simplest form of multi-label loss (the popular Hamming loss), the well-known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Anqi Mao , Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

Previous work shows that adversarially robust generalization requires larger sample complexity, and the same dataset, e.g., CIFAR-10, which enables good standard accuracy may not suffice to train robust models. Since collecting new training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-21 Tianyu Pang , Kun Xu , Yinpeng Dong , Chao Du , Ning Chen , Jun Zhu

Designing proper loss functions is essential in training deep networks. Especially in the field of semantic segmentation, various evaluation metrics have been proposed for diverse scenarios. Despite the success of the widely adopted…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Hao Li , Chenxin Tao , Xizhou Zhu , Xiaogang Wang , Gao Huang , Jifeng Dai

Loss functions drive the optimization of machine learning algorithms. The choice of a loss function can have a significant impact on the training of a model, and how the model learns the data. Binary classification is one of the major…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-02 Rayan Wali

In order to train networks for verified adversarial robustness, it is common to over-approximate the worst-case loss over perturbation regions, resulting in networks that attain verifiability at the expense of standard performance. As shown…

Two R\'{e}nyi-type generalizations of the Shannon cross-entropy, the R\'{e}nyi cross-entropy and the Natural R\'{e}nyi cross-entropy, were recently used as loss functions for the improved design of deep learning generative adversarial…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-06 Ferenc Cole Thierrin , Fady Alajaji , Tamás Linder

Cross Entropy (CE) has an important role in machine learning and, in particular, in neural networks. It is commonly used in neural networks as the cost between the known distribution of the label and the Softmax/Sigmoid output. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-17 Ron Shoham , Haim Permuter

In this paper, we provide a new algorithm for the problem of prediction in Reinforcement Learning, \emph{i.e.}, estimating the Value Function of a Markov Reward Process (MRP) using the linear function approximation architecture, with memory…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-09-30 Ajin George Joseph , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Minimizing cross-entropy is a widely used method for training artificial neural networks. Many training procedures based on backpropagation use cross-entropy directly as their loss function. Instead, this theoretical essay investigates a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Stefan Jaeger

This paper investigates the impact of the loss function in value-based methods for reinforcement learning through an analysis of underlying prediction objectives. We theoretically show that mean absolute error is a better prediction…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Alex Ayoub , David Szepesvári , Alireza Bakhtiari , Csaba Szepesvári , Dale Schuurmans

Widely used loss functions for CNN segmentation, e.g., Dice or cross-entropy, are based on integrals over the segmentation regions. Unfortunately, for highly unbalanced segmentations, such regional summations have values that differ by…

Image and Video Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-10-20 Hoel Kervadec , Jihene Bouchtiba , Christian Desrosiers , Eric Granger , Jose Dolz , Ismail Ben Ayed

In a multi-class classification problem, it is standard to model the output of a neural network as a categorical distribution conditioned on the inputs. The output must therefore be positive and sum to one, which is traditionally enforced…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2016-03-01 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

In this paper, we introduce harmonic loss as an alternative supervisory signal for training neural networks and large language models (LLMs). Harmonic loss differs from standard cross-entropy loss by (a) replacing the usual SoftMax…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 David D. Baek , Ziming Liu , Riya Tyagi , Max Tegmark

While cross entropy (CE) is the most commonly used loss to train deep neural networks for classification tasks, many alternative losses have been developed to obtain better empirical performance. Among them, which one is the best to use is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-11 Jinxin Zhou , Chong You , Xiao Li , Kangning Liu , Sheng Liu , Qing Qu , Zhihui Zhu