Softpick: No Attention Sink, No Massive Activations with Rectified
  Softmax
Authors: name: Zayd M. K. Zuhri; name: Erland Hilman Fuadi; name: Alham Fikri Aji
Published: 2025-04-29 17:36:18

Abstract: We introduce softpick, a rectified, not sum-to-one, drop-in replacement for
softmax in transformer attention mechanisms that eliminates attention sink and
massive activations. Our experiments with 340M parameter models demonstrate
that softpick maintains performance parity with softmax on standard benchmarks
while achieving 0% sink rate. The softpick transformer produces hidden states
with significantly lower kurtosis (340 vs 33,510) and creates sparse attention
maps (46.97% sparsity). Models using softpick consistently outperform softmax
when quantized, with particularly pronounced advantages at lower bit
precisions. Our analysis and discussion shows how softpick has the potential to
open new possibilities for quantization, low-precision training, sparsity
optimization, pruning, and interpretability. Our code is available at
https://github.com/zaydzuhri/softpick-attention.