You’re constructing a Keras mannequin. In case you haven’t been doing deep studying for therefore lengthy, getting the output activations and price perform proper may contain some memorization (or lookup). You could be making an attempt to recall the overall pointers like so:
So with my cats and canine, I’m doing 2-class classification, so I’ve to make use of sigmoid activation within the output layer, proper, after which, it’s binary crossentropy for the price perform…
Or: I’m doing classification on ImageNet, that’s multi-class, in order that was softmax for activation, after which, value must be categorical crossentropy…
It’s superb to memorize stuff like this, however figuring out a bit in regards to the causes behind usually makes issues simpler. So we ask: Why is it that these output activations and price features go collectively? And, do they at all times must?
In a nutshell
Put merely, we select activations that make the community predict what we wish it to foretell.
The associated fee perform is then decided by the mannequin.
It is because neural networks are usually optimized utilizing most chance, and relying on the distribution we assume for the output models, most chance yields totally different optimization goals. All of those goals then reduce the cross entropy (pragmatically: mismatch) between the true distribution and the anticipated distribution.
Let’s begin with the only, the linear case.
Regression
For the botanists amongst us, right here’s an excellent easy community meant to foretell sepal width from sepal size:
Our mannequin’s assumption right here is that sepal width is often distributed, given sepal size. Most frequently, we’re making an attempt to foretell the imply of a conditional Gaussian distribution:
[p(y|mathbf{x} = N(y; mathbf{w}^tmathbf{h} + b)]
In that case, the price perform that minimizes cross entropy (equivalently: optimizes most chance) is imply squared error.
And that’s precisely what we’re utilizing as a value perform above.
Alternatively, we’d want to predict the median of that conditional distribution. In that case, we’d change the price perform to make use of imply absolute error:
mannequin %>% compile(
optimizer = "adam",
loss = "mean_absolute_error"
)
Now let’s transfer on past linearity.
Binary classification
We’re enthusiastic chicken watchers and wish an software to inform us when there’s a chicken in our backyard – not when the neighbors landed their airplane, although. We’ll thus prepare a community to differentiate between two courses: birds and airplanes.
# Utilizing the CIFAR-10 dataset that conveniently comes with Keras.
cifar10 <- dataset_cifar10()
x_train <- cifar10$prepare$x / 255
y_train <- cifar10$prepare$y
is_bird <- cifar10$prepare$y == 2
x_bird <- x_train[is_bird, , ,]
y_bird <- rep(0, 5000)
is_plane <- cifar10$prepare$y == 0
x_plane <- x_train[is_plane, , ,]
y_plane <- rep(1, 5000)
x <- abind::abind(x_bird, x_plane, alongside = 1)
y <- c(y_bird, y_plane)
mannequin <- keras_model_sequential() %>%
layer_conv_2d(
filter = 8,
kernel_size = c(3, 3),
padding = "identical",
input_shape = c(32, 32, 3),
activation = "relu"
) %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_conv_2d(
filter = 8,
kernel_size = c(3, 3),
padding = "identical",
activation = "relu"
) %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_flatten() %>%
layer_dense(models = 32, activation = "relu") %>%
layer_dense(models = 1, activation = "sigmoid")
mannequin %>% compile(
optimizer = "adam",
loss = "binary_crossentropy",
metrics = "accuracy"
)
mannequin %>% match(
x = x,
y = y,
epochs = 50
)
Though we usually discuss “binary classification,” the way in which the result is often modeled is as a Bernoulli random variable, conditioned on the enter information. So:
[P(y = 1|mathbf{x}) = p, 0leq pleq1]
A Bernoulli random variable takes on values between (0) and (1). In order that’s what our community ought to produce.
One thought could be to simply clip all values of (mathbf{w}^tmathbf{h} + b) outdoors that interval. But when we do that, the gradient in these areas will likely be (0): The community can’t study.
A greater approach is to squish the whole incoming interval into the vary (0,1), utilizing the logistic sigmoid perform
[ sigma(x) = frac{1}{1 + e^{(-x)}} ]

As you may see, the sigmoid perform saturates when its enter will get very massive, or very small. Is that this problematic?
It relies upon. Ultimately, what we care about is that if the price perform saturates. Had been we to decide on imply squared error right here, as within the regression activity above, that’s certainly what might occur.
Nevertheless, if we observe the overall precept of most chance/cross entropy, the loss will likely be
[- log P (y|mathbf{x})]
the place the (log) undoes the (exp) within the sigmoid.
In Keras, the corresponding loss perform is binary_crossentropy
. For a single merchandise, the loss will likely be
- (- log(p)) when the bottom reality is 1
- (- log(1-p)) when the bottom reality is 0
Right here, you may see that when for a person instance, the community predicts the improper class and is extremely assured about it, this instance will contributely very strongly to the loss.

What occurs after we distinguish between greater than two courses?
Multi-class classification
CIFAR-10 has 10 courses; so now we need to determine which of 10 object courses is current within the picture.
Right here first is the code: Not many variations to the above, however be aware the modifications in activation and price perform.
cifar10 <- dataset_cifar10()
x_train <- cifar10$prepare$x / 255
y_train <- cifar10$prepare$y
mannequin <- keras_model_sequential() %>%
layer_conv_2d(
filter = 8,
kernel_size = c(3, 3),
padding = "identical",
input_shape = c(32, 32, 3),
activation = "relu"
) %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_conv_2d(
filter = 8,
kernel_size = c(3, 3),
padding = "identical",
activation = "relu"
) %>%
layer_max_pooling_2d(pool_size = c(2, 2)) %>%
layer_flatten() %>%
layer_dense(models = 32, activation = "relu") %>%
layer_dense(models = 10, activation = "softmax")
mannequin %>% compile(
optimizer = "adam",
loss = "sparse_categorical_crossentropy",
metrics = "accuracy"
)
mannequin %>% match(
x = x_train,
y = y_train,
epochs = 50
)
So now we’ve got softmax mixed with categorical crossentropy. Why?
Once more, we wish a sound likelihood distribution: Chances for all disjunct occasions ought to sum to 1.
CIFAR-10 has one object per picture; so occasions are disjunct. Then we’ve got a single-draw multinomial distribution (popularly often called “Multinoulli,” principally because of Murphy’s Machine studying(Murphy 2012)) that may be modeled by the softmax activation:
[softmax(mathbf{z})_i = frac{e^{z_i}}{sum_j{e^{z_j}}}]
Simply because the sigmoid, the softmax can saturate. On this case, that can occur when variations between outputs turn out to be very large.
Additionally like with the sigmoid, a (log) in the price perform undoes the (exp) that’s answerable for saturation:
[log softmax(mathbf{z})_i = z_i – logsum_j{e^{z_j}}]
Right here (z_i) is the category we’re estimating the likelihood of – we see that its contribution to the loss is linear and thus, can by no means saturate.
In Keras, the loss perform that does this for us known as categorical_crossentropy
. We use sparse_categorical_crossentropy within the code which is similar as categorical_crossentropy
however doesn’t want conversion of integer labels to one-hot vectors.
Let’s take a better have a look at what softmax does. Assume these are the uncooked outputs of our 10 output models:

Now that is what the normalized likelihood distribution seems to be like after taking the softmax:

Do you see the place the winner takes all within the title comes from? This is a vital level to bear in mind: Activation features are usually not simply there to supply sure desired distributions; they’ll additionally change relationships between values.
Conclusion
We began this publish alluding to widespread heuristics, corresponding to “for multi-class classification, we use softmax activation, mixed with categorical crossentropy because the loss perform.” Hopefully, we’ve succeeded in exhibiting why these heuristics make sense.
Nevertheless, figuring out that background, you too can infer when these guidelines don’t apply. For instance, say you need to detect a number of objects in a picture. In that case, the winner-takes-all technique isn’t probably the most helpful, as we don’t need to exaggerate variations between candidates. So right here, we’d use sigmoid on all output models as an alternative, to find out a likelihood of presence per object.
Goodfellow, Ian, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville. 2016. Deep Studying. MIT Press.
Murphy, Kevin. 2012. Machine Studying: A Probabilistic Perspective. MIT Press.