{"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-differantiable-continuous","title":"SoftSort: A Differantiable Continuous Relaxation of the argsort Operator","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2020-01-01","proceeding":"ICML 2020 1","authors":["Sebastian Prillo","Julian Eisenschlos"],"abstract":"Sorting is an important procedure in computer science. However, the argsort operator - which takes as input a vector and returns its sorting per-mutation - 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. However, the relaxations proposed so far are computationally complex. In this work we propose a simple continuous relaxation for the argsort operator. Unlike previous works, our relaxation is straight-forward: 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 up to six times faster than competing approaches. We open-source the code to reproduce all of the experiments","url_abs":"https://proceedings.icml.cc/static/paper_files/icml/2020/535-Paper.pdf","url_pdf":"https://proceedings.icml.cc/static/paper_files/icml/2020/535-Paper.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-differantiable-continuous","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":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}