# Signal to Noise Ratio Loss Function

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12275 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12275/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [FaceNet: A Unified Embedding for Face Recognition and Clustering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03832/) (2015)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [CosFace: Large Margin Cosine Loss for Deep Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09414/) (2018)
- [Deep metric learning using Triplet network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6622/) (2014)
- [Large-Margin Softmax Loss for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02295/) (2016)
- [Hessian-free Optimization for Learning Deep Multidimensional Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.03475/) (2015)
- [Recurrent Scale Approximation for Object Detection in CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.09531/) (2017)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work proposes a new loss function targeting classification problems, utilizing a source of information overlooked by cross entropy loss. First, we derive a series of the tightest upper and lower bounds for the probability of a random variable in a given interval. Second, a lower bound is proposed for the probability of a true positive for a parametric classification problem, where the form of probability density function (pdf) of data is given. A closed form for finding the optimal function of unknowns is derived to maximize the probability of true positives. Finally, for the case that the pdf of data is unknown, we apply the proposed boundaries to find the lower bound of the probability of true positives and upper bound of the probability of false positives and optimize them using a loss function which is given by combining the boundaries. We demonstrate that the resultant loss function is a function of the signal to noise ratio both within and across logits. We empirically evaluate our proposals to show their benefit for classification problems.