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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

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

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

Since its introduction, softmax attention has become the backbone of modern transformer architectures due to its expressiveness and scalability across a wide range of tasks. However, the main drawback of softmax attention is the quadratic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Gabriel Mongaras , Eric C. Larson

The softmax content-based attention mechanism has proven to be very beneficial in many applications of recurrent neural networks. Nevertheless it suffers from two major computational limitations. First, its computations for an attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-09-20 Alexandre de Brébisson , Pascal Vincent

Softmax is widely used in neural networks for multiclass classification, gate structure and attention mechanisms. The statistical assumption that the input is normal distributed supports the gradient stability of Softmax. However, when used…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-08-17 Shulun Wang , Bin Liu , Feng Liu

To encourage intra-class compactness and inter-class separability among trainable feature vectors, large-margin softmax methods are developed and widely applied in the face recognition community. The introduction of the large-margin concept…

Audio and Speech Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-22 Jingjing Huo , Yingbo Gao , Weiyue Wang , Ralf Schlüter , Hermann Ney

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

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

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

In classification tasks, softmax functions are ubiquitously used as output activations to produce predictive probabilities. Such outputs only capture aleatoric uncertainty. To capture epistemic uncertainty, approximate Gaussian inference…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Bálint Mucsányi , Nathaël Da Costa , Philipp Hennig

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

Cross-entropy loss together with softmax is arguably one of the most common used supervision components in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Despite its simplicity, popularity and excellent performance, the component does not explicitly…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-11-21 Weiyang Liu , Yandong Wen , Zhiding Yu , Meng Yang

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…

Softmax with the cross entropy loss is the standard configuration for current neural classification models. The gold score for a target class is supposed to be 1, but it is never reachable under the softmax schema. Such a problem makes the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Qi Lv , Lei Geng , Ziqiang Cao , Min Cao , Sujian Li , Wenjie Li , Guohong Fu

Sampling-based methods, e.g., Deep Ensembles and Bayesian Neural Nets have become promising approaches to improve the quality of uncertainty estimation and robust generalization. However, they suffer from a large model size and high latency…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Ha Manh Bui , Anqi Liu

Widely adopted in modern Vision Transformer designs, Softmax attention can effectively capture long-range visual information; however, it incurs excessive computational cost when dealing with high-resolution inputs. In contrast, linear…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Dongchen Han , Yifan Pu , Zhuofan Xia , Yizeng Han , Xuran Pan , Xiu Li , Jiwen Lu , Shiji Song , Gao Huang

In recent years, the softmax model and its fast approximations have become the de-facto loss functions for deep neural networks when dealing with multi-class prediction. This loss has been extended to language modeling and recommendation,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-19 Ugo Tanielian , Flavian Vasile

Transformers have transformed the field of natural language processing. This performance is largely attributed to the use of stacked self-attention layers, each of which consists of matrix multiplies as well as softmax operations. As a…

Hardware Architecture · Computer Science 2021-03-18 Jacob R. Stevens , Rangharajan Venkatesan , Steve Dai , Brucek Khailany , Anand Raghunathan