Numerical stability of binary cross entropy loss and the log-sum-exp trick

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When training a binary classifier, cross entropy (CE) loss is usually used as squared error loss cannot distinguish bad predictions from extremely bad predictions. The CE loss is defined as follows:
$$L_{CE}(y,t) = tlogy + (1-t)log(1-y)$$
where $y$ is the probability of the sample falling in the positive class $(t=1)$. $y = \sigma(z)$, where $\sigma$ is a sigmoid function.

When implementing CE loss, we could calculate $\sigma(z)$ first and then plug $y$ in the definition of CE loss. However, there is a problem with this in practice. At the beginning of training, a positive example might be confidently classified as a negative example $(z<<0$, implying $y \approx 0)$. If $y$ is small enough, it could be smaller than the smallest floating point value i.e. numerically zero. Then we get $-\infty$ if we take the log of 0 when computing the cross-entropy. To tackle this potential numerical stability issue, the logistic function and cross-entropy are usually combined into one in package in Tensorflow and Pytorch $$L_{CE}(z,t) = L_{CE}(\sigma(z),t) = tlog\frac{1}{1+e^{-x}}+(1-t)log\frac{e^{-x}}{1+e^{-x}}$$ Still, the numerical stability issue is not completely under control since $e^{-x}$ could blow up if z is a large negative number. To tackle this potential problem, the "log-sum-exp" trick is used to shift the center of the exponential sum. The log-sum-exp trick is described as follows $$log\sum_{i=1}^ne^{x_i} = a+log\sum_{i=1}^ne^{x_i-a}$$ Using this formula, we can force the greatest value to be zero even if other values would underflow. So $a$ can be $max(x_i)$ in practice. References: [1] http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~rgrosse/courses/csc321_2017/readings/L04%20Training%20a%20Classifier.pdf [2] https://www.xarg.org/2016/06/the-log-sum-exp-trick-in-machine-learning/