Cross Entropy in PyTorch

Question

I'm a bit confused by the cross entropy loss in PyTorch.

Considering this example:

import torch
import torch.nn as nn
from torch.autograd import Variable

output = Variable(torch.FloatTensor([0,0,0,1])).view(1, -1)
target = Variable(torch.LongTensor([3]))

criterion = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()
loss = criterion(output, target)
print(loss)

I would expect the loss to be 0. But I get:

Variable containing:
 0.7437
[torch.FloatTensor of size 1]

As far as I know cross entropy can be calculated like this:

But shouldn't be the result then 1*log(1) = 0 ?

I tried different inputs like one-hot encodings, but this doesn't work at all, so it seems the input shape of the loss function is okay.

I would be really grateful if someone could help me out and tell me where my mistake is.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

In your example you are treating output [0, 0, 0, 1] as probabilities as required by the mathematical definition of cross entropy. But PyTorch treats them as outputs, that don’t need to sum to 1, and need to be first converted into probabilities for which it uses the softmax function.

So H(p, q) becomes:

H(p, softmax(output))

Translating the output [0, 0, 0, 1] into probabilities:

softmax([0, 0, 0, 1]) = [0.1749, 0.1749, 0.1749, 0.4754]

whence:

-log(0.4754) = 0.7437