thumb|A mollifier (top) in Dimension (mathematics)|dimension one. At the bottom, in red is a function with a corner (left) and sharp jump (right), and in blue is its mollified version.
thumb|A mollifier (top) in Dimension (mathematics)|dimension one. At the bottom, in red is a function with a corner (left) and sharp jump (right), and in blue is its mollified version.
In mathematics, mollifiers (also known as approximations to the identity) are particular smooth functions, used for example in distribution theory to create sequences of smooth functions approximating nonsmooth (generalized) functions, via convolution. Intuitively, given a (generalized) function, convolving it with a mollifier "mollifies" it, that is, its sharp features are smoothed, while still remaining close to the original.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).