Adaptive Sparse Softmax: An Effective and Efficient Softmax Variant

TL;DR

The paper introduces Adaptive Sparse Softmax (AS-Softmax), a novel softmax variant that improves training efficiency and classification accuracy by focusing on relevant classes and adaptively accelerating learning across various modalities.

Contribution

It proposes a new softmax transformation that discards irrelevant classes during training and an adaptive gradient strategy, enhancing efficiency and performance across multiple tasks.

Findings

AS-Softmax outperforms standard softmax and variants in diverse classification tasks.

Training speed is increased by approximately 20% with the adaptive gradient strategy.

Loss correlates strongly with validation accuracy, indicating effective learning.

Abstract

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 training process continue forever and leads to overfitting. Moreover, the "target-approach-1" training goal forces the model to continuously learn all samples, leading to a waste of time in handling some samples which have already been classified correctly with high confidence, while the test goal simply requires the target class of each sample to hold the maximum score. To solve the above weaknesses, we propose the Adaptive Sparse softmax (AS-Softmax) which designs a reasonable and test-matching transformation on top of softmax. For more purposeful learning, we discard the classes with far smaller scores compared with the actual class during training. Then the model could focus on learning to distinguish the target class from its strong opponents, which is also the great challenge in test. In addition, since the training losses of easy samples will gradually drop to 0 in AS-Softmax, we develop an adaptive gradient accumulation strategy based on the masked sample ratio to speed up training. We verify the proposed AS-Softmax on a variety of text multi-class, text multi-label, text token classification, image classification and audio classification tasks with class sizes ranging from 5 to 5000+. The results show that AS-Softmax consistently outperforms softmax and its variants, and the loss of AS-Softmax is remarkably correlated with classification performance in validation. Furthermore, adaptive gradient accumulation strategy can bring about 1.2x training speedup comparing with the standard softmax while maintaining classification effectiveness.