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Any gradient descent optimization requires to choose a learning rate. With deeper and deeper models, tuning that learning rate can easily become tedious and does not necessarily lead to an ideal convergence. We propose a variation of the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2018-04-10 Mathieu Ravaut , Satya Gorti

Gradient descent has been a central training principle for artificial neural networks from the early beginnings to today's deep learning networks. The most common implementation is the backpropagation algorithm for training feed-forward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-09 Stefan Jaeger

In this paper, we aim at providing an introduction to the gradient descent based optimization algorithms for learning deep neural network models. Deep learning models involving multiple nonlinear projection layers are very challenging to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-12 Jiawei Zhang

We present a randomized forward mode gradient (RFG) as an alternative to backpropagation. RFG is a random estimator for the gradient that is constructed based on the directional derivative along a random vector. The forward mode automatic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-02-05 Khemraj Shukla , Yeonjong Shin

In a variety of problems originating in supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning, the loss function is defined by an expectation over a collection of random variables, which might be part of a probabilistic model or the external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-01-06 John Schulman , Nicolas Heess , Theophane Weber , Pieter Abbeel

The successes of deep learning, variational inference, and many other fields have been aided by specialized implementations of reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD) to compute gradients of mega-dimensional objectives. The AD…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Deniz Oktay , Nick McGreivy , Joshua Aduol , Alex Beatson , Ryan P. Adams

We study a general class of bilevel problems, consisting in the minimization of an upper-level objective which depends on the solution to a parametric fixed-point equation. Important instances arising in machine learning include…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-07-13 Riccardo Grazzi , Luca Franceschi , Massimiliano Pontil , Saverio Salzo

The performance of deep neural networks is well-known to be sensitive to the setting of their hyperparameters. Recent advances in reverse-mode automatic differentiation allow for optimizing hyperparameters with gradients. The standard way…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-04-07 Jie Fu , Hongyin Luo , Jiashi Feng , Kian Hsiang Low , Tat-Seng Chua

Training Neural ODEs requires backpropagating through an ODE solve. The state-of-the-art backpropagation method is recursive checkpointing that balances recomputation with memory cost. Here, we introduce a class of algebraically reversible…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Sam McCallum , James Foster

With increasing scale in model and dataset size, the training of deep neural networks becomes a massive computational burden. One approach to speed up the training process is Selective Backprop. For this approach, we perform a forward pass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-11 Lukas Balles , Cedric Archambeau , Giovanni Zappella

Many popular feature-attribution methods for interpreting deep neural networks rely on computing the gradients of a model's output with respect to its inputs. While these methods can indicate which input features may be important for the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-11 Kevin Du , Lucas Torroba Hennigen , Niklas Stoehr , Alexander Warstadt , Ryan Cotterell

Neural networks are trained primarily based on their inputs and outputs, without regard for their internal mechanisms. These neglected mechanisms determine properties that are critical for safety, like (i) transparency; (ii) the absence of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Alex Cloud , Jacob Goldman-Wetzler , Evžen Wybitul , Joseph Miller , Alexander Matt Turner

Backpropagation is the default learning rule for artificial neural networks and is often treated as the settled approach whenever differentiability is available. In this work, we revisit this convention through a theoretical lens of sample…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-28 Yibo Jacky Zhang , Zeyu Tang , Sanmi Koyejo

This paper focuses on training implicit models of infinite layers. Specifically, previous works employ implicit differentiation and solve the exact gradient for the backward propagation. However, is it necessary to compute such an exact but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-13 Zhengyang Geng , Xin-Yu Zhang , Shaojie Bai , Yisen Wang , Zhouchen Lin

Despite being the cornerstone of deep learning, backpropagation is criticized for its inherent sequentiality, which can limit the scalability of very deep models. Such models faced convergence issues due to vanishing gradient, later…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Erwan Fagnou , Paul Caillon , Blaise Delattre , Alexandre Allauzen

The back-propagation algorithm is the cornerstone of deep learning. Despite its importance, few variations of the algorithm have been attempted. This work presents an approach to discover new variations of the back-propagation equation. We…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-08-09 Maximilian Alber , Irwan Bello , Barret Zoph , Pieter-Jan Kindermans , Prajit Ramachandran , Quoc Le

The goal of this document is to provide a pedagogical introduction to the main concepts underpinning the training of deep neural networks using gradient descent; a process known as backpropagation. Although we focus on a very influential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-11-30 Laurent Boué

It seems that in the current age, computers, computation, and data have an increasingly important role to play in scientific research and discovery. This is reflected in part by the rise of machine learning and artificial intelligence,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Ronan Keane

Interpreting gradient methods as fixed-point iterations, we provide a detailed analysis of those methods for minimizing convex objective functions. Due to their conceptual and algorithmic simplicity, gradient methods are widely used in…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-08-16 Alexander Jung

Backpropagation is typically presented as a symbolic procedure: a backward pass topologically distinct from inference, with non-local error signals and synchronous global clocking, features with no clear analog in physical reality. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Antonino Emanuele Scurria