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…
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48 results for “softmax distributions”
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 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.
Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) have limitations when the goal is to generate sequences of discrete elements. The reason for this is that samples from a distribution on discrete objects such as the multinomial are not differentiable with respect to the distribution parameters. This problem can be avoided by using…
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.
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…
Investigates statistical properties of perturb-softmax and perturb-argmax distributions.
problem Underexplored statistical properties of Gumbel-Softmax and Gumbel-Argmax distributions.
method Investigates convexity and differentiability to determine completeness and minimality of these distributions.
result Identifies parameters that admit complete and minimal representation of probability distributions.
Unpacking Softmax: How Temperature Drives Representation Collapse, Compression, and Generalizationcs.LG
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.
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.
A new loss function improves neural networks' out-of-distribution detection without side effects.
problem Neural networks struggle with out-of-distribution detection due to SoftMax loss issues.
method Proposes IsoMax loss replacing SoftMax loss, maintaining high entropy and fast inferences.
result Significantly improves neural networks' out-of-distribution detection performance.
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…
A new method speeds up SoftMax normalization for embedding learning.
problem Efficiently learning distributed representations with SoftMax normalization.
method Proposes a linear-time heuristic approximation for , optimizing cross entropy.
result Achieves higher or comparable accuracy to existing methods with lower computational time.
Paper proposes a new estimator for generic discrete distributions.
problem Estimating gradients for stochastic nodes in deep generative models.
method Generalized Gumbel-Softmax estimator using truncation, Gumbel-Softmax trick, and linear transformation.
result Efficacy and practical value demonstrated in synthetic examples and topic models.
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…
Density-Softmax improves uncertainty estimation and robustness without sampling, reducing model size and latency.
problem Sampling-based uncertainty estimation methods suffer from large model size and high latency.
method Combines a Lipschitz-constrained feature extractor with the softmax layer to create a sampling-free deterministic framework.
result Density-Softmax reduces over-confidence under distribution shifts and achieves competitive results in uncertainty and robustness.
The Gumbel-Softmax is a continuous distribution over the simplex that is often used as a relaxation of discrete distributions. Because it can be readily interpreted and easily reparameterized, it enjoys widespread use. We propose a modular and more flexible family of reparameterizable distributions where Gaussian noise…
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.
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 …
Proposes a new method to approximate Gaussian inference in classification tasks.
problem Uncertainty quantification in classification tasks using softmax functions.
method Develops a new formalism to approximate Gaussian distributions over logit space and proposes using element-wise normCDF or sigmoid instead of softmax.
result Improves uncertainty quantification compared to softmax Monte Carlo sampling.
Categorical variables are a natural choice for representing discrete structure in the world. However, stochastic neural networks rarely use categorical latent variables due to the inability to backpropagate through samples. In this work, we present an efficient gradient estimator that replaces the non-differentiable sa…
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.
We present a new method for uncertainty estimation and out-of-distribution detection in neural networks with softmax output. We extend softmax layer with an additional constant input. The corresponding additional output is able to represent the uncertainty of the network. The proposed method requires neither additional…
Softmax Q-Distribution Estimation for Structured Prediction: A Theoretical Interpretation for RAMLcs.LG
Reward augmented maximum likelihood (RAML), a simple and effective learning framework to directly optimize towards the reward function in structured prediction tasks, has led to a number of impressive empirical successes. RAML incorporates task-specific reward by performing maximum-likelihood updates on candidate outpu…
A new operator based on t-distributions improves NN classifiers' robustness to out-of-distribution samples.
problem NN classifiers assign extreme probabilities to out-of-distribution samples, leading to unreliable predictions.
method Derive a novel operator using t-distributions to model uncertainty more accurately.
result Classifiers using the new operator are more robust to out-of-distribution samples.
Softmax Is Not an Artificial Trick: An Information-Theoretic View of Softmax in Neural Networkscs.LG
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…
Softmax PG methods can take extremely long to converge, even with exact gradients.
problem Softmax policy gradient methods can take an impractically long time to converge in reinforcement learning.
method Softmax policy gradient methods with exact gradient computation.
result Softmax PG methods can take exponential number of iterations to converge, even with optimal initialization.
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 large output vocabularies. Recently, this has been shown to have limited repres…
A new algorithm optimizes softmax units in large language models.
problem Efficiently computing gradients for large-scale language models.
method Zero-th Order method for approximating gradients.
result The algorithm converges and efficiently computes gradients.
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.
Efficiently approximates uncertainty in classification models using Dirichlet distributions.
problem Inefficient computation of uncertainty estimates in Bayesian deep learning.
method Revised Laplace Bridge method to construct a Dirichlet approximation of softmax output distributions.
result The Dirichlet approximation leads to more efficient computation and better uncertainty estimates.
Balanced Activation improves object detection performance on long-tailed datasets.
problem Mismatch between training and testing label distributions in object detection.
method Introduces Balanced Activation (Balanced Softmax and Balanced Sigmoid) to address label distribution shift.
result Balanced Activation provides ~3% gain in mAP on LVIS-1.0 compared to state-of-the-art methods.
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.
Softmax policy gradient achieves global optimality in wide neural networks with entropy regularization.
problem Optimizing softmax policies with neural networks in the mean-field regime.
method Modeling neural networks as Wasserstein gradient flows and proving global optimality of fixed points.
result Global optimality of softmax policy gradient in wide single hidden layer neural networks with entropy regularization.
Unified framework for gradient estimation in combinatorial spaces.
problem Scaling relaxed gradient estimators to large combinatorial distributions.
method Introducing stochastic softmax tricks within the perturbation model framework.
result Stochastic softmax tricks improve model performance and discover more latent structure.
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 types; and it has a large memory footprint. We propose a general technique for rep…
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 relationships. However, with standard softmax attention, all attention heads are de…
Mean-Field Approximation to Gaussian-Softmax Integral with Application to Uncertainty Estimationcs.LG
A new method for uncertainty estimation in neural networks using Gaussian-softmax integration.
problem Quantifying uncertainty in neural network predictions.
method Proposes a single-model approach integrating Gaussian distribution with softmax outputs, using mean-field approximation.
result Competitive performance on uncertainty estimation tasks and outperforms many methods on out-of-distribution detection.
Neural language models have been widely used in various NLP tasks, including machine translation, next word prediction and conversational agents. However, it is challenging to deploy these models on mobile devices due to their slow prediction speed, where the bottleneck is to compute top candidates in the softmax layer…
Attention temperature improves robustness of ICL in high-dimensional settings.
problem ICL robustness failure under distribution shift in high dimensions.
method Analyzed a Transformer with approximate softmax attention, derived a closed-form error expression, and showed optimal temperature minimizes error.
result Optimal attention temperature minimizes ICL generalization error under distribution shift.
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.
The paper explores how AI systems use information geometry to encode semantic structure.
problem How AI systems encode semantic structure into geometric representation spaces.
method Focuses on softmax distributions and develops dual steering method for robust concept manipulation.
result Dual steering optimally modifies target concepts while minimizing off-target changes.
LLMs learn peaked distributions slowly due to power-law losses.
problem Slow convergence of loss in training large language models.
method Systematic analysis of toy models and empirical evaluation of LLMs.
result Power-law time scaling with an exponent of 1/3 for learning peaked distributions.
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.
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.
A method for diffusion on probability simplex for generative models.
problem Tension between continuous and discrete data in diffusion models.
method Proposes using softmax function applied to Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Process on probability simplex.
result Method extends to bounded image generation.
Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection approaches usually present special requirements (e.g., hyperparameter validation, collection of outlier data) and produce side effects (e.g., classification accuracy drop, slower energy-inefficient inferences). We argue that these issues are a consequence of the SoftMax loss anisotro…
New CNN approach reduces overconfidence in object classification predictions.
problem Overconfident predictions from deep models, especially SoftMax layer.
method Introduces CNN probabilistic approach using Logit layer for Bayesian inference.
result Proposed approach shows promising performance compared to SoftMax.