Papers › Learning with Fenchel-Young Losses

Learning with Fenchel-Young Losses

8 Jan 2019arXiv:1901.02324archive 2025-07-28

Mathieu Blondel, André F. T. Martins, Vlad Niculae

Over the past decades, numerous loss functions have been been proposed for a variety of supervised learning tasks, including regression, classification, ranking, and more generally structured prediction. Understanding the core principles and theoretical properties underpinning these losses is key to choose the right loss for the right problem, as well as to create new losses which combine their strengths. In this paper, we introduce Fenchel-Young losses, a generic way to construct a convex loss function for a regularized prediction function. We provide an in-depth study of their properties in a very broad setting, covering all the aforementioned supervised learning tasks, and revealing new connections between sparsity, generalized entropies, and separation margins. We show that Fenchel-Young losses unify many well-known loss functions and allow to create useful new ones easily. Finally, we derive efficient predictive and training algorithms, making Fenchel-Young losses appealing both in theory and practice.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

deep-spin/entmax mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mblondel/fenchel-young-losses mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
mblondel/projection-losses mentioned on GitHubBSD-2-Clause report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Structured Prediction

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections