LogSumExp Function Properties: Lemmas for Energy Functions

Written by reinforcement | Published 2025/06/24
Tech Story Tags: transformer-models | associative-memory | hopfield-networks | model-generalization | attention-mechanism | cross-entropy-loss | model-scaling | neural-network-performance

TLDRExplore key mathematical properties of the LogSumExp function, including bounds and continuity, which are crucial for understanding energy functions in Transformers.via the TL;DR App

Table of Links

Abstract and 1 Introduction

2 Related Work

3 Model and 3.1 Associative memories

3.2 Transformer blocks

4 A New Energy Function

4.1 The layered structure

5 Cross-Entropy Loss

6 Empirical Results and 6.1 Empirical evaluation of the radius

6.2 Training GPT-2

6.3 Training Vanilla Transformers

7 Conclusion and Acknowledgments

Appendix A. Deferred Tables

Appendix B. Some Properties of the Energy Functions

Appendix C. Deferred Proofs from Section 5

Appendix D. Transformer Details: Using GPT-2 as an Example

References

Appendix B. Some Properties of the Energy Functions

We introduce some useful properties of the LogSumExp function defined below. This is particularly useful because The softmax function, widely utilized in the Transformer models, is the gradient of the LogSumExp function. As shown in (Grathwohl et al., 2019), the LogSumExp corresponds to the energy function of the a classifier.

Lemma 1 LogSumExp(x) is convex.

Proof

Consequently, we have the following smooth approximation for the min function.

B.1 Proof of Proposition 2

Authors:

(1) Xueyan Niu, Theory Laboratory, Central Research Institute, 2012 Laboratories, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.;

(2) Bo Bai baibo (8@huawei.com);

(3) Lei Deng (deng.lei2@huawei.com);

(4) Wei Han (harvey.hanwei@huawei.com).


This paper is available on arxiv under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED license.


Written by reinforcement | Leading research and publication in advancing reinforcement machine learning, shaping intelligent systems & automation.
Published by HackerNoon on 2025/06/24