# Soft Sorting#

[1]:

import sys

!pip install -q git+https://github.com/ott-jax/ott@main

[2]:

import functools
import jax
import jax.numpy as jnp
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import scipy.ndimage

import ott


## Sorting operators#

Given an array of $$n$$ numbers, several operators arise around the idea of sorting:

• The sort operator reshuffles the values in order, from smallest to largest.

• The rank operator associates to each value its rank, when sorting in ascending order.

• The quantile operator consider a level value between 0 and 1, to return the element of the sorted array indexed at int(n * level), the median for instance if that level is set to $$0.5$$.

• The topk operator is equivalent to the sort operator, but only returns the largest $$k$$ values, namely the last $$k$$ values of the sorted vector.

Here are some examples

[ ]:

x = jnp.array([1.0, 5.0, 4.0, 8.0, 12.0])
jnp.sort(x)

DeviceArray([ 1.,  4.,  5.,  8., 12.], dtype=float32)

[ ]:

def rank(x):
return jnp.argsort(jnp.argsort(x))

rank(x)

DeviceArray([0, 2, 1, 3, 4], dtype=int32)

[ ]:

jnp.quantile(x, 0.5)

DeviceArray(5., dtype=float32)


## Soft operators#

Sorting operators are ubiquitous in CS and stats, but have several limitations when used in modern deep learning architectures. For instance, ranks is integer valued: if used at some point within a DL pipeline, one won’t be able to differentiate through that step because the gradient of these integer values does not exist, or is ill-defined. Indeed, the vector of ranks of a slightly perturbed vector $$x+\Delta x$$ is the same as that for $$x$$, or switches ranks at some indices when inversions occur. Practially speaking, any loss or intermediary operation based on ranks will break backpropagation.

This colab shows how soft counterparts to these operators are defined in OTT. By soft, we mean differentiable, approximate proxies to these original “hard” operators. For instance soft_sort.ranks returned by OTT operators won’t be integer valued, but instead floating point approximations; soft_sort.sort will not contain exactly the n values contained in the input array, reordered, but instead n combinaisons of thoses values that look very close to them.

These soft operators trade off accuracy for a more informative Jacobian. This trade-off is controlled by a non-negative parameter epsilon: The smaller epsilon, the closer to the original ranking and sorting operations; The bigger, the more bias yet the more informative gradients. That epsilon also correponds to that used in regularized OT (see doc on sinkhorn).

The behavior of these operators is illustrated below.

### Soft sort#

[ ]:

softsort = jax.jit(ott.tools.soft_sort.sort)
print(softsort(x))

[ 1.0504128  4.1227636  4.8619957  8.006992  11.958238 ]


As we can see, the values are close to the original ones but not exactly equal. Here, epsilon is set by default to 1e-2. A smaller epsilon reduces that gap, whereas a bigger one would tend to squash all returned values to the average of the input values.

[ ]:

print(softsort(x, epsilon=1e-4))
print(softsort(x, epsilon=1e-1))

[ 0.99836105  3.9950502   5.0066338   8.009814   11.990994  ]
[ 2.5705311  3.7338936  5.462167   8.000687  10.233383 ]


### Soft topk#

The soft operators we propose build on a common idea: formulate sorting operations as optimal transports from an array of $$n$$ values to a predefined target measure of $$m$$ points. The user is free to choose $$m$$, providing great flexibility depending on the use case.

Transporting an input discrete measure of $$n$$ points towards one of $$m$$ points results in a $$O(nm)$$ complexity. The bigger $$m$$, the more fine grained quantities we recover. For instance, if we wish to get both a fine grained yet differentiable sorted vector, or vector of ranks, one can define a target measure of size $$m=n$$, leading to a $$O(n^2)$$ complexity.

On the contrary, if we are only interested in singling out a few important ranks, such as when considering top k values, we can simply transport the inputs points onto $$k+1$$ targets, leading to a smaller complexity in $$O(nk)$$. When $$k \ll n$$, the gain in time and memory can be of course substantial.

Here is an example.

[ ]:

top5 = jax.jit(functools.partial(ott.tools.soft_sort.sort, topk=5))

# Generates a vector of size 1000
big_x = jax.random.uniform(jax.random.PRNGKey(0), (1000,))
top5(big_x)

DeviceArray([0.95064366, 0.974145  , 0.98327726, 0.9879082 , 0.99055624],            dtype=float32)


### Soft Ranks#

Similarly, we can compute soft ranks, which do not output integer values, but provide instead a differentiable, float valued, approximation of the vector of ranks.

[ ]:

softranks = jax.jit(ott.tools.soft_sort.ranks)
print(softranks(x))

[0.01550194 1.8386561  1.1487608  2.9977381  3.9927583 ]


### Regularization effect#

As mentioned earlier, epsilon controls the tradeoff between accuracy and differentiability. Larger epsilon tend to merge the soft ranks of values that are close, up to the point where they all collapse to the average rank or agverage value.

[ ]:

epsilons = np.logspace(-3, 1, 100)
sorted_values = []
ranks = []
for e in epsilons:
sorted_values.append(softsort(x, epsilon=e))
ranks.append(softranks(x, epsilon=e))

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, 2, figsize=(14, 5))

for values, ax, title in zip(
(sorted_values, ranks), axes, ("sorted values", "ranks")
):
ax.plot(epsilons, np.array(values), color="k", lw=11)
ax.plot(epsilons, np.array(values), lw=7)
ax.set_xlabel("$\epsilon$", fontsize=24)
ax.tick_params(axis="both", which="both", labelsize=18)
ax.set_title(f"Soft {title}", fontsize=24)
ax.set_xscale("log")


Note how none of the lines above cross. This is a fundamental property of soft-sort operators, proved in : soft sorting and ranking operators are monotonic: the vector of soft-sorted values will remain increasing for any epsilon, whereas if an input value $$x_i$$ has a smaller (hard) rank than $$x_j$$, its soft-rank, for any value of epsilon, will also remain smaller than that for $$x_j$$.

### Soft quantile#

To illustrate further the flexibility provided by setting target measures, one can notice that when a soft quantile is targeted (for instance the soft median), the complexity becomes simply $$O(n)$$. This is illustrated below to define “soft median” differentiable filter on a noisy image.

[ ]:

softquantile = jax.jit(ott.tools.soft_sort.quantile)
softquantile(x, level=0.5)

DeviceArray([4.995768], dtype=float32)

[ ]:

import io
import requests

url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/master/doc/_static/stinkbug.png"
resp = requests.get(url)
image = image[..., 0]

[ ]:

def salt_and_pepper(im, amount=0.05):
result = np.copy(im)
result = np.reshape(result, (-1,))
num_noises = int(np.ceil(amount * im.size))
indices = np.random.randint(0, im.size, num_noises)
values = np.random.uniform(size=(num_noises,)) > 0.5
result[indices] = values
return np.reshape(result, im.shape)

noisy_image = salt_and_pepper(image, amount=0.1)

[ ]:

softmedian = jax.jit(functools.partial(ott.tools.soft_sort.quantile, level=0.5))

fns = {"original": None, "median": np.median}
for e in [0.01, 1.0]:
fns[f"soft {e}"] = functools.partial(softmedian, epsilon=e)
fns.update(mean=np.mean)

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1, len(fns), figsize=(len(fns) * 6, 4))
for key, ax in zip(fns, axes):
fn = fns[key]
soft_denoised = (
scipy.ndimage.generic_filter(noisy_image, fn, size=(3, 3))
if fn is not None
else noisy_image
)
ax.imshow(soft_denoised)
ax.set_title(key, fontsize=22)


## Learning through a soft ranks operator.#

A crucial feature of OTT lies in the ability it provides to differentiate seamlessly through any quantities that follow an optimal transport computation, making it very easy for end-users to plug them directly into end-to-end differentiable architectures.

In this tutorial we show how OTT can be used to implement a loss based on soft ranks. That soft 0-1 loss is used here to train a neural network for image classification, as done by

This implementation relies on FLAX a neural network library for JAX.

### Model#

Similarly to , we will train a vanilla CNN made of 4 convolutional blocks, in order to classify images from the CIFAR-10 dataset.

[ ]:

from typing import Any
import flax
from flax import linen as nn

class ConvBlock(nn.Module):
"""A simple CNN block."""

features: int = 32
dtype: Any = jnp.float32

@nn.compact
def __call__(self, x, train: bool = True):
x = nn.Conv(features=self.features, kernel_size=(3, 3))(x)
x = nn.relu(x)
x = nn.Conv(features=self.features, kernel_size=(3, 3))(x)
x = nn.relu(x)
x = nn.max_pool(x, window_shape=(2, 2), strides=(2, 2))
return x

class CNN(nn.Module):
"""A simple CNN model."""

num_classes: int = 10
dtype: Any = jnp.float32

@nn.compact
def __call__(self, x, train: bool = True):
x = ConvBlock(features=32)(x)
x = ConvBlock(features=64)(x)
x = x.reshape((x.shape[0], -1))  # flatten
x = nn.Dense(features=512)(x)
x = nn.relu(x)
x = nn.Dense(features=self.num_classes)(x)
return x


### Losses & Metrics#

The $$0/1$$ loss of a classifier on a labeled example is $$0$$ if the logit of the true class ranks on top (here, would have rank 9, since CIFAR-10 considers 10 classes). Of course the $$0/1$$ loss is non-differentiable, which is why the cross-entropy loss is used instead.

Here, as in , we consider a differentiable “soft” 0/1 loss by measuring the gap between the soft-rank of the logit of the right answer and the target rank, 9. If that gap is bigger than 0, then we incurr a loss equal to that gap.

[ ]:

def cross_entropy_loss(logits, labels):
logits = nn.log_softmax(logits)
return -jnp.sum(labels * logits) / labels.shape[0]

def soft_error_loss(logits, labels):
"""The average distance between the best rank and the rank of the true class."""
ranks_fn = jax.jit(functools.partial(ott.tools.soft_sort.ranks, axis=-1))
soft_ranks = ranks_fn(logits)
return jnp.mean(
nn.relu(labels.shape[-1] - 1 - jnp.sum(labels * soft_ranks, axis=1))
)


To know more about training a neural network with Flax, please refer to the Flax Imagenet examples. After 100 epochs through the CIFAR-10 training examples, we are able to reproduce the results from and see that a soft $$0/1$$ error loss, building on top of soft_sort.ranks, can provide a competitive alternative to the cross entropy loss for classification tasks. As mentioned in that paper, that loss is less prone to overfitting.

[ ]:

# Plot results from training