Papers › Online normalizer calculation for softmax

Online normalizer calculation for softmax

8 May 2018arXiv:1805.02867archive 2025-07-28

Maxim Milakov, Natalia Gimelshein

The Softmax function is ubiquitous in machine learning, multiple previous works suggested faster alternatives for it. In this paper we propose a way to compute classical Softmax with fewer memory accesses and hypothesize that this reduction in memory accesses should improve Softmax performance on actual hardware. The benchmarks confirm this hypothesis: Softmax accelerates by up to 1.3x and Softmax+TopK combined and fused by up to 5x.

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NVIDIA/online-softmax officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubBSD-3-Clause report

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BIG-bench Machine Learning

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Softmax

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