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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

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 a ubiquitous ingredient of modern machine learning algorithms. It maps an input vector onto a probability simplex and reweights the input by concentrating the probability mass at large entries. Yet, as a smooth approximation to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Yuxuan Zhou , Mario Fritz , Margret Keuper

The softmax function is widely used in artificial neural networks for the multiclass classification problems, where the softmax transformation enforces the output to be positive and sum to one, and the corresponding loss function allows to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-24 Shaoshi Sun , Zhenyuan Zhang , BoCheng Huang , Pengbin Lei , Jianlin Su , Shengfeng Pan , Jiarun Cao

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

Nowadays artificial neural network models achieve remarkable results in many disciplines. Functions mapping the representation provided by the model to the probability distribution are the inseparable aspect of deep learning solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-24 Klaudia Bałazy , Łukasz Struski , Marek Śmieja , Jacek Tabor

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

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

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

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

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 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 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

It is often remarked that neural networks fail to increase their uncertainty when predicting on data far from the training distribution. Yet naively using softmax confidence as a proxy for uncertainty achieves modest success in tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-10 Tim Pearce , Alexandra Brintrup , Jun Zhu

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

Attention is a core component of transformer architecture, whether encoder-only, decoder-only, or encoder-decoder model. However, the standard softmax attention often produces noisy probability distribution, which can impair effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Dhananjay Ram , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

A soft-max function has two main efficiency measures: (1) approximation - which corresponds to how well it approximates the maximum function, (2) smoothness - which shows how sensitive it is to changes of its input. Our goal is to identify…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Alessandro Epasto , Mohammad Mahdian , Vahab Mirrokni , Manolis Zampetakis

The merit of Conformal Prediction (CP), as a distribution-free framework for uncertainty quantification, depends on generating prediction sets that are efficient, reflected in small average set sizes, while adaptive, meaning they signal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Navid Akhavan Attar , Hesam Asadollahzadeh , Ling Luo , Uwe Aickelin

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
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