English

Software-based Automatic Differentiation is Flawed

Machine Learning 2023-05-09 v1

Abstract

Various software efforts embrace the idea that object oriented programming enables a convenient implementation of the chain rule, facilitating so-called automatic differentiation via backpropagation. Such frameworks have no mechanism for simplifying the expressions (obtained via the chain rule) before evaluating them. As we illustrate below, the resulting errors tend to be unbounded.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.03863,
  title  = {Software-based Automatic Differentiation is Flawed},
  author = {Daniel Johnson and Trevor Maxfield and Yongxu Jin and Ronald Fedkiw},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.03863},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T10:27:25.518Z