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Online normalizer calculation for softmax

A method to compute the Softmax function with reduced memory accesses improves performance by up to 1.3x and the combined Softmax+TopK by up to 5x.

Year
2018
Venue
arXiv 2018
Authors
2
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arxiv.org/abs/1805.02867v2ARXIV-DEFAULT
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Abstract

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.

Authors

2