Research
NLP
Efficient Softmax Approximation for GPUs
August 6, 2017
Abstract
We propose an approximate strategy to efficiently train neural network based language models over very large vocabularies. Our approach, called adaptive softmax, circumvents the linear dependency on the vocabulary size by exploiting the unbalanced word distribution to form clusters that explicitly minimize the expectation of computation time. Our approach further reduces the computational time by exploiting the specificities of modern architectures and matrix-matrix vector operations, making it particularly suited for graphical processing units. Our experiments carried out on standard benchmarks, such as EuroParl and One Billion Word, show that our approach brings a large gain in efficiency over standard approximations while achieving an accuracy close to that of the full softmax. The code of our method is available at https://github.com/ facebookresearch/adaptive-softmax
AUTHORS
Related Publications
June 05, 2026
Conversational AI
Ranking & Recommendations
Superintelligent Retrieval Agent: The Next Frontier of Agentic Retrieval
Zeyu Yang, Qi Ma, Jason Chen, Anshumali Shrivastava
June 05, 2026
May 19, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
EgoBabyVLM: Benchmarking Cross-Modal Learning from Naturalistic Egocentric Video Data
Dongyan Lin, Phillip Rust, Angel Villar Corrales, Alvin W. M. Tan, Mahi Luthra, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Rashel Moritz, Sheila Krogh-Jespersen, Vanessa Stark, Surya Parimi, Jiayi Shen, Youssef Benchekroun, Yosuke Higuchi, Martin Gleize, Tom Fizycki, Nicolas Hamilakis, Manel Khentout, Sho Tsuji, Balázs Kégl, Juan Pino, Michael C. Frank, Emmanuel Dupoux
May 19, 2026
May 17, 2026
Conversational AI
GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains
Rohit Patel, Alexandre Rezende, Steven McClain
May 17, 2026
May 12, 2026
Human & Machine Intelligence
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Jean Remi King, Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Sophia Houhamdi, Jarod Levy, Josephine Raugel, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Teon Brooks, Katelyn Begany, Yohann Benchetrit, Marlene Careil, Hubert Jacob Banville, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Simon Dahan, Jérémy Rapin
May 12, 2026
October 31, 2019
NLP
Facebook AI's WAT19 Myanmar-English Translation Task Submission
Peng-Jen Chen, Jiajun Shen, Matt Le, Vishrav Chaudhary, Ahmed El-Kishky, Guillaume Wenzek, Myle Ott, Marc’Aurelio Ranzato
October 31, 2019
March 14, 2019
NLP
On the Pitfalls of Measuring Emergent Communication | Facebook AI Research
Ryan Lowe, Jakob Foerster, Y-Lan Boureau, Joelle Pineau, Yann Dauphin
March 14, 2019
January 13, 2020
NLP
Scaling up online speech recognition using ConvNets | Facebook AI Research
Vineel Pratap, Qiantong Xu, Jacob Kahn, Gilad Avidov, Tatiana Likhomanenko, Awni Hannun, Vitaliy Liptchinsky, Gabriel Synnaeve, Ronan Collobert
January 13, 2020
April 30, 2018
NLP
Computer Vision
Mastering the Dungeon: Grounded Language Learning by Mechanical Turker Descent | Facebook AI Research
Zhilin Yang, Saizheng Zhang, Jack Urbanek, Will Feng, Alexander H. Miller, Arthur Szlam, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston
April 30, 2018
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026