{"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/von-mises-fisher-loss-an-exploration-of","title":"von Mises-Fisher Loss: An Exploration of Embedding Geometries for Supervised Learning","arxiv_id":"2103.15718","date":"2021-03-29","proceeding":"ICCV 2021 10","authors":["Tyler R. Scott","Andrew C. Gallagher","Michael C. Mozer"],"abstract":"Recent work has argued that classification losses utilizing softmax cross-entropy are superior not only for fixed-set classification tasks, but also by outperforming losses developed specifically for open-set tasks including few-shot learning and retrieval. Softmax classifiers have been studied using different embedding geometries -- Euclidean, hyperbolic, and spherical -- and claims have been made about the superiority of one or another, but they have not been systematically compared with careful controls. We conduct an empirical investigation of embedding geometry on softmax losses for a variety of fixed-set classification and image retrieval tasks. An interesting property observed for the spherical losses lead us to propose a probabilistic classifier based on the von Mises-Fisher distribution, and we show that it is competitive with state-of-the-art methods while producing improved out-of-the-box calibration. We provide guidance regarding the trade-offs between losses and how to choose among them.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.15718v4","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.15718v4.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":"von-mises-fisher-loss-an-exploration-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/google-research/vmf_embeddings","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"classification-1","task_name":"Classification"},{"task_slug":"few-shot-learning","task_name":"Few-Shot Learning"},{"task_slug":"classification","task_name":"General Classification"},{"task_slug":"image-retrieval","task_name":"Image Retrieval"},{"task_slug":"retrieval","task_name":"Retrieval"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2103.15718","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2103.15718"}},"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":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/google-research/vmf_embeddings","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":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":"2b1cfac482da2f56","entry":"calc_ece_em_quant","repo":"google-research/vmf_embeddings","repo_kind":"official","path":"vmf_embeddings/eval_utils.py","file_url":"https://github.com/google-research/vmf_embeddings/blob/HEAD/vmf_embeddings/eval_utils.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"Apache-2.0","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2b1cfac482da2f56"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}