# Exp-normalize trick

This trick is the very close cousin of the infamous log-sum-exp trick (scipy.misc.logsumexp).

Supposed you'd like to evaluate a probability distribution $$\boldsymbol{\pi}$$ parametrized by a vector $$\boldsymbol{x} \in \mathbb{R}^n$$ as follows:

$$\pi_i = \frac{ \exp(x_i) }{ \sum_{j=1}^n \exp(x_j) }$$

The exp-normalize trick leverages the following identity to avoid numerical overflow. For any $$b \in \mathbb{R}$$,

$$\pi_i = \frac{ \exp(x_i - b) \exp(b) }{ \sum_{j=1}^n \exp(x_j - b) \exp(b) } = \frac{ \exp(x_i - b) }{ \sum_{j=1}^n \exp(x_j - b) }$$

In other words, the $$\boldsymbol{\pi}$$ is shift-invariant. A reasonable choice is $$b = \max_{i=1}^n x_i$$. With this choice, overflow due to $$\exp$$ is impossible$$-$$the largest number exponentiated after shifting is $$0$$.

The naive implementation is terrible when there are large numbers!

>>> x = np.array([1, -10, 1000])
>>> np.exp(x) / np.exp(x).sum()
RuntimeWarning: overflow encountered in exp
RuntimeWarning: invalid value encountered in true_divide
Out[4]: array([ 0.,  0., nan])


The exp-normalize trick avoids this common problem.

def exp_normalize(x):
b = x.max()
y = np.exp(x - b)
return y / y.sum()

>>> exp_normalize(x)
array([0., 0., 1.])


Log-sum-exp for computing the log-distibution

$$\log \pi_i = x_i - \mathrm{logsumexp}(\boldsymbol{x})$$

where

$$\mathrm{logsumexp}(\boldsymbol{x}) = b + \log \sum_{j=1}^n \exp(x_j - b)$$

Typically with the same choice for $$b$$ as above.

Exp-normalize v. log-sum-exp

Exp-normalize is the gradient of log-sum-exp. So you probably need to know both tricks!

If what you want to remain in log-space, that is, compute $$\log(\boldsymbol{\pi})$$, you should use logsumexp. However, if $$\boldsymbol{\pi}$$ is your goal, then exp-normalize trick is for you! Since it avoids additional calls to $$\exp$$, which would be required if using log-sum-exp and more importantly exp-normalize is more numerically stable!

Numerically stable sigmoid function

The sigmoid function can be computed with the exp-normalize trick in order to avoid numerical overflow. In the case of $$\text{sigmoid}(x)$$, we have a distribution with unnormalized log probabilities $$[x,0]$$, where we are only interested in the probability of the first event. From the exp-normalize identity, we know that the distributions $$[x,0]$$ and $$[0,-x]$$ are equivalent (to see why, plug in $$b=\max(0,x)$$). This is why sigmoid is often expressed in one of two equivalent ways:

$$\text{sigmoid}(x) = 1/(1+\exp(-x)) = \exp(x) / (\exp(x) + 1)$$

Interestingly, each version covers an extreme case: $$x=\infty$$ and $$x=-\infty$$, respectively. Below is some python code which implements the trick:

def sigmoid(x):
"Numerically stable sigmoid function."
if x >= 0:
z = exp(-x)
return 1 / (1 + z)
else:
# if x is less than zero then z will be small, denom can't be
# zero because it's 1+z.
z = exp(x)
return z / (1 + z)


Closing remarks: The exp-normalize distribution is also known as a Gibbs measure (sometimes called a Boltzmann distribution) when it is augmented with a temperature parameter. Exp-normalize is often called "softmax," which is unfortunate because log-sum-exp is also called "softmax." However, unlike exp-normalize, it earned the name because it is acutally a soft version of the max function, where as exp-normalize is closer to "soft argmax." Nonetheless, most people still call exp-normalize "softmax."