SoftSort: A Continuous Relaxation for the argsort Operator

Sebastian Prillo
Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Machine Learning, PMLR (2020)

Abstract

While sorting is an important procedure in computer science, the argsort operator - which takes as input a vector and returns its sorting permutation - has a discrete image and thus zero gradients almost everywhere. This prohibits end-to-end, gradient-based learning of models that rely on the argsort operator. A natural way to overcome this problem is to replace the argsort operator with a continuous relaxation. Recent work has shown a number of ways to do this, but the relaxations proposed so far are computationally complex. In this work we propose a simple continuous relaxation for the argsort operator which has the following qualities: it can be implemented in three lines of code, achieves state-of-the-art performance, is easy to reason about mathematically - substantially simplifying proofs - and is faster than competing approaches. We open source the code to reproduce all of the experiments and results.

Research Areas