  Intra-class compactness and inter-class separability are crucial indicators
to measure the effectiveness of a model to produce discriminative features,
where intra-class compactness indicates how close the features with the same
label are to each other and inter-class separability indicates how far away the
features with different labels are. In this work, we investigate intra-class
compactness and inter-class separability of features learned by convolutional
networks and propose a Gaussian-based softmax ($\mathcal{G}$-softmax) function
that can effectively improve intra-class compactness and inter-class
separability. The proposed function is simple to implement and can easily
replace the softmax function. We evaluate the proposed $\mathcal{G}$-softmax
function on classification datasets (i.e., CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny
ImageNet) and on multi-label classification datasets (i.e., MS COCO and
NUS-WIDE). The experimental results show that the proposed
$\mathcal{G}$-softmax function improves the state-of-the-art models across all
evaluated datasets. In addition, analysis of the intra-class compactness and
inter-class separability demonstrates the advantages of the proposed function
over the softmax function, which is consistent with the performance
improvement. More importantly, we observe that high intra-class compactness and
inter-class separability are linearly correlated to average precision on MS
COCO and NUS-WIDE. This implies that improvement of intra-class compactness and
inter-class separability would lead to improvement of average precision.
