The paper investigates polynomial alternatives to softmax in transformer models.
problem The effectiveness of softmax attention in transformers is questioned.
method The authors explore polynomial activations as alternatives to softmax, focusing on their ability to regularize the attention matrix.
result Certain polynomials can serve as effective substitutes for softmax in transformer applications, achieving strong performance.
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 by a softmax. This probabilistic mapping allows to use the maximum likelihood pri…
Paper extends sparse alternatives to softmax for continuous domains, enabling efficient attention mechanisms.
problem Efficiently assigning zero probability to irrelevant categories in continuous domains.
method Extend alpha-entmax to continuous domains, introducing continuous-domain attention mechanisms.
result Continuous attention allows attending to time intervals and compact regions, improving text classification, machine translation, and visual question answering.
Revises logistic-softmax likelihood for Bayesian meta-learning in few-shot classification.
problem Inherent uncertainty in logistic-softmax leads to suboptimal performance in meta-learning.
method Redesigns logistic-softmax likelihood with a temperature parameter for better control of prior confidence.
result Achieves well-calibrated uncertainty estimates and comparable/superior performance on benchmark datasets.
Study shows MSE with sigmoid can match SCE in classification tasks, especially with noisy data.
problem Inconsistent errors in neural network classification tasks.
method Introduced Output Reset algorithm to use MSE with sigmoid activation.
result MSE with sigmoid activation achieves comparable accuracy and convergence rates to Softmax Cross-Entropy, especially in noisy data scenarios.
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 hedge against problems that arise from putting all of one's weight behind a sing…
Bayesian approach improves neural network classification accuracy and uncertainty.
problem Overconfidence and lack of uncertainty in softmax for classification tasks.
method Model categorical probability using a random variable with a prior distribution.
result Consistent gains in generalization performance across multiple tasks.
We present ADMM-Softmax, an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving multinomial logistic regression (MLR) problems. Our method is geared toward supervised classification tasks with many examples and features. It decouples the nonlinear optimization problem in MLR into three steps that can be solv…
Softmax and k-means clustering are mathematically linked, improving neural network robustness.
problem Improving neural network robustness against adversarial attacks.
method Formally proving the connection between softmax and k-means, proposing Centroid Based Tailoring.
result The proposed Gauss network is less susceptible to one-pixel attacks.
Evidential Softmax preserves multimodality in sparse probability distributions for generative models.
problem Sparse probability distributions in deep generative models make exact marginalization computationally intractable.
method Introduce ev-softmax, a sparse normalization function that preserves multimodality and can be trained with probabilistic loss functions.
result ev-softmax outperforms existing techniques in distributional accuracy and dimensionality reduction.
Sigmoid gating is more sample efficient than softmax in mixture of experts.
problem Softmax gating leads to unnecessary competition among experts, causing representation collapse.
method Theoretical analysis of a regression framework with mixture of experts, identifying identifiability conditions and convergence rates.
result Sigmoid gating requires fewer samples to achieve the same expert estimation error as softmax gating.
This paper improves MADDPG's performance in discrete grid-world scenarios.
problem MADDPG struggles with discrete action spaces in grid-world tasks.
method Integrates alternative Gumbel-Softmax estimators into MADDPG.
result One alternative estimator significantly improves performance in grid-world tasks.
A new catnat function improves gradient descent for categorical variables.
problem Gradient descent challenges with discrete latent categorical variables.
method Replaced softmax with catnat, a hierarchical binary split function.
result Catnat function offers significant advantages in gradient descent.
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 lookup scale linearly in the size of the attended sequence. Second, it does not enc…
A new topology design improves zero-shot classification performance in contrastive learning.
problem Improving zero-shot classification performance in contrastive visual-textual alignment.
method Proposed an alternative topology design using multiple class tokens and an oblique manifold with negative inner product.
result Improves zero-shot classification performance by an average of 6.1%.
Transformers model contextual relations using probabilistic measures, revealing their expressive power.
problem Lack of clear understanding of Transformer's ability to model contextual relations.
method Introduced a measure-theoretic framework connecting softmax attention and entropy-regularized optimal transport.
result Transformer architectures can approximate arbitrary contextual relations, and the choice of normalization affects how these relations are represented.
Despite being the standard loss function to train multi-class neural networks, the log-softmax has two potential limitations. First, it involves computations that scale linearly with the number of output classes, which can restrict the size of problems we are able to tackle with current hardware. Second, it remains unc…
Softmax is an output activation function for modeling categorical probability distributions in many applications of deep learning. However, a recent study revealed that softmax can be a bottleneck of representational capacity of neural networks in language modeling (the softmax bottleneck). In this paper, we propose an…
Unified framework for sequence models using test-time regression.
problem Designing efficient sequence models with associative memory.
method Formalizing associative recall as regression over input tokens, deriving various sequence models.
result Clarifies the effectiveness of query-key normalization in softmax attention and offers new generalizations.
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 classes and utilize an estimate of the loss gradient based on these classes, known as…
Converting an n-dimensional vector to a probability distribution over n objects is a commonly used component in many machine learning tasks like multiclass classification, multilabel classification, attention mechanisms etc. For this, several probability mapping functions have been proposed and employed in literature s…
This note is concerned with accurate and computationally efficient approximations of moments of Gaussian random variables passed through sigmoid or softmax mappings. These approximations are semi-analytical (i.e. they involve the numerical adjustment of parametric forms) and highly accurate (they yield 5% error at most…
Improves uncertainty estimation and OOD detection in neural networks.
problem Accurate uncertainty estimation and OOD detection in neural networks.
method Investigates one-vs-all and distance-based logit representations for probabilities.
result One-vs-all formulations improve calibration without additional complexity.
Paper introduces Balanced Meta-Softmax for better long-tailed visual recognition.
problem Long-tailed distribution mismatch between training and testing data.
method Balanced Meta-Softmax, an unbiased extension of Softmax, using a Meta Sampler.
result Balanced Meta-Softmax outperforms state-of-the-art solutions on visual recognition and instance segmentation.
PARC uses piecewise linear predictors for regression and classification.
problem Multivariate regression and classification problems.
method Alternates between ridge and softmax regression, and cluster assignment based on accuracy and separability.
result Converges to a local minimum in a finite number of steps.
Paper introduces hierarchical softmax for global hierarchical classification tasks.
problem Improving classification accuracy in tasks with class hierarchies.
method Global hierarchical neural networks using hierarchical softmax.
result Hierarchical softmax outperforms regular softmax in multiple datasets.
New method uses temperature to control sparse MoE convergence rates.
problem Sparse MoE convergence rates are slow due to temperature interactions.
method Proposes a novel activation gate to improve convergence rates.
result Improved convergence rates to polynomial rates via novel gate.
Typically, Softmax is used in the final layer of a neural network to get a probability distribution for output classes. But the main problem with Softmax is that it is computationally expensive for large scale data sets with large number of possible outputs. To approximate class probability efficiently on such large sc…
This research improves neural network uncertainty estimates and reliability.
problem Lack of inherent uncertainty estimates and variability in softmax scores.
method Ensemble-based Dirichlet modeling with method of moments estimator.
result Improved stability and predictive uncertainty estimates.
Binary testing for softmax models requires many samples, similar to leverage score models.
problem Binary hypothesis testing for softmax models and leverage score models.
method Analyzing sample complexity and drawing analogies between models.
result Sample complexity is asymptotically \(O(ε^{-2})\), where \(ε\) is the distance between model parameters.
Softmax temperature influences model representation rank and performance.
problem Understanding and optimizing softmax function's impact on model representations.
method Investigated softmax function's role in deep neural networks, introduced rank deficit bias.
result Softmax temperature affects model representation rank and can improve performance.
Softmax is a standard final layer used in Neural Nets (NNs) to summarize information encoded in the trained NN and return a prediction. However, Softmax leverages only a subset of the class-specific structure encoded in the trained model and ignores potentially valuable information: During training, models encode an ar…
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 encourage discriminative learning of features. In this paper, we propose a gene…
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 framework that incorporates softmax as an intrinsic component is still lacking. I…
Efficiently compress pretrained models using RSI for improved predictive accuracy.
problem Efficiently compressing large pretrained models for practical deployment.
method Randomized subspace iteration (RSI) for low-rank approximation of pretrained models.
result RSI achieves near-optimal approximation quality and outperforms RSVD in predictive accuracy.
Softmax confidence misrepresents uncertainty in neural networks.
problem Neural networks fail to increase uncertainty on out-of-distribution data.
method Investigates two implicit biases in softmax confidence.
result Softmax confidence correlates with epistemic uncertainty due to decision boundary structure and deep network filtering.
Computations for the softmax function are significantly expensive when the number of output classes is large. In this paper, we present a novel softmax inference speedup method, Doubly Sparse Softmax (DS-Softmax), that leverages sparse mixture of sparse experts to efficiently retrieve top-k classes. Different from most…
Unified framework for studying softmax attention under large prompts.
problem Challenges in theoretical analysis of softmax attention.
method Measure-based framework for finite and infinite prompts.
result Softmax attention converges to linear attention in the large-prompt regime.
Interpolates between SPG and NeuRD with Capped Implicit Exploration.
problem Combining SPG and NeuRD for better performance in non-stationary environments.
method Introduces Capped Implicit Exploration (CIX) to interpolate between SPG and NeuRD.
result NeuRD-CIX performs well more consistently than NeuRD while retaining NeuRD's advantages.
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 literature of efficiently computable but biased estimates of the softmax. In this paper …
Transformers use ReLUs to approximate softmax efficiently.
problem Analyzing resource usage in softmax transformer models.
method Translating ReLU approximation results to softmax attention mechanisms.
result Economic resource bounds for softmax attention mechanisms.
Solves challenges in estimating parameters of softmax gating Gaussian mixture models.
problem Identifiability issues and complex interactions in Gaussian mixture of experts.
method Proposes novel Voronoi loss functions and establishes convergence rates of MLE.
result Connects convergence rate of MLE to a solvability problem of polynomial equations.
Speaker Recognition is a challenging task with essential applications such as authentication, automation, and security. The SincNet is a new deep learning based model which has produced promising results to tackle the mentioned task. To train deep learning systems, the loss function is essential to the network performa…
The paper proves neural networks with ReLU and softmax can approximate any function.
problem Approximating functions and class labels in neural networks.
method Extended universal approximator theory to neural networks with ReLU and softmax.
result Neural networks with ReLU and softmax can approximate any function and class labels.
This paper develops sparse alternatives to continuous distributions, including new types of Gaussians and attention mechanisms.
problem Creating flexible continuous distributions with varying support for machine learning applications.
method Defining Ω-regularized prediction maps and Fenchel-Young losses for arbitrary domains, and deriving new types of Gaussians and attention mechanisms. result Sparse alternatives to continuous distributions, including deformed exponential families and β-Gaussians, are introduced. Unified interpretation of softmax cross-entropy and negative sampling for knowledge graph embedding.
problem Lack of theoretical relationship between softmax cross-entropy and negative sampling loss functions in knowledge graph embedding.
method Used Bregman divergence to provide a unified interpretation of the two loss functions.
result Theoretical findings for fair comparison of softmax cross-entropy and negative sampling are derived.
Introduces gradient decay in Softmax for better generalization.
problem Improving generalization performance in neural networks.
method Gradient decay hyperparameter in Softmax for varying gradient rates based on probability.
result Gradient decay rate affects generalization performance and can be tuned for better optimization.
New L2 regularization improves softmax MAB performance.
problem Improving softmax MAB performance with vanishing regularization.
method L2 regularization with vanishing parameter analyzed and proven convergent.
result Vanishing L2 regularization makes softmax MAB more numerically advantageous.