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Cross Entropy

Cross-entropy loss measures the difference between a predicted probability distribution and the true distribution, heavily penalizing confident wrong predictions. It is the standard loss for classification.

What is Cross Entropy?

Cross-entropy loss measures the difference between a predicted probability distribution and the true distribution, heavily penalizing confident wrong predictions. It is the standard loss for classification.

Cross-entropy loss measures the difference between a predicted probability distribution and the true distribution, heavily penalizing confident wrong predictions. It is the standard loss for classification.

Where is it used?

Every autoregressive LLM — GPT, Llama, Claude — trains with cross-entropy loss over the vocabulary at each token position to learn next-token prediction.

How to build it

Use `F.cross_entropy(logits, targets)` where logits are (N, vocab_size) and targets are (N,) integer labels; verify it equals `-log_softmax(logits)[targets]`.