Demystifying Loss Functions for Classification

Simon Kornblith, Honglak Lee, Ting Chen, Mohammad Norouzi

Keywords: softmax, classification, representational similarity, transfer learning, label smoothing, dropout

Abstract: It is common to use the softmax cross-entropy loss to train neural networks on classification datasets where a single class label is assigned to each example. However, it has been shown that modifying softmax cross-entropy with label smoothing or regularizers such as dropout can lead to higher performance. In this paper, we compare a variety of loss functions and output layer regularization strategies that improve performance on image classification tasks. We find differences in the outputs of networks trained with these different objectives, in terms of accuracy, calibration, out-of-distribution robustness, and predictions. However, differences in hidden representations of networks trained with different objectives are restricted to the last few layers; representational similarity reveals no differences among network layers that are not close to the output. We show that all objectives that improve over vanilla softmax loss produce greater class separation in the penultimate layer of the network, which potentially accounts for improved performance on the original task, but results in features that transfer worse to other tasks.

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