{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/softsort-a-continuous-relaxation-for-the","title":"SoftSort: A Continuous Relaxation for the argsort Operator","arxiv_id":"2006.16038","date":"2020-06-29","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sebastian Prillo","Julian Martin Eisenschlos"],"abstract":"While sorting is an important procedure in computer science, the argsort operator - which takes as input a vector and returns its sorting permutation - has a discrete image and thus zero gradients almost everywhere. This prohibits end-to-end, gradient-based learning of models that rely on the argsort operator. A natural way to overcome this problem is to replace the argsort operator with a continuous relaxation. Recent work has shown a number of ways to do this, but the relaxations proposed so far are computationally complex. In this work we propose a simple continuous relaxation for the argsort operator which has the following qualities: it can be implemented in three lines of code, achieves state-of-the-art performance, is easy to reason about mathematically - substantially simplifying proofs - and is faster than competing approaches. We open source the code to reproduce all of the experiments and results.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.16038v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.16038v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"softsort-a-continuous-relaxation-for-the","repo_url":"https://github.com/sprillo/softsort","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2006.16038","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2006.16038"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/sprillo/softsort","reach":null},{"provenance":"deterministic:regex_extraction","url":"https://github.com/kuangliu/pytorch-cifar","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"b8959eabbc42c445","entry":"SoftSort","repo":"sprillo/softsort","repo_kind":"official","path":"pytorch/softsort.py","file_url":"https://github.com/sprillo/softsort/blob/HEAD/pytorch/softsort.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b8959eabbc42c445"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}