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Related papers: Understanding Automatic Differentiation Pitfalls

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Deep learning has seen tremendous success over the past decade in computer vision, machine translation, and gameplay. This success rests in crucial ways on gradient-descent optimization and the ability to learn parameters of a neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Fei Wang , Daniel Zheng , James Decker , Xilun Wu , Grégory M. Essertel , Tiark Rompf

We study the correctness of automatic differentiation (AD) in the context of a higher-order, Turing-complete language (PCF with real numbers), both in forward and reverse mode. Our main result is that, under mild hypotheses on the primitive…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2021-01-13 Damiano Mazza , Michele Pagani

Algorithmic differentiation (AD) is a set of techniques that provide partial derivatives of computer-implemented functions. Such a function can be supplied to state-of-the-art AD tools via its source code, or via an intermediate…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2023-07-10 Max Aehle , Johannes Blühdorn , Max Sagebaum , Nicolas R. Gauger

Derivative-based algorithms are ubiquitous in statistics, machine learning, and applied mathematics. Automatic differentiation offers an algorithmic way to efficiently evaluate these derivatives from computer programs that execute relevant…

Computation · Statistics 2022-03-01 Charles C. Margossian , Michael Betancourt

Automatic differentiation (AD) has been a topic of interest for researchers in many disciplines, with increased popularity since its application to machine learning and neural networks. Although many researchers appreciate and know how to…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Birthe van den Berg , Tom Schrijvers , James McKinna , Alexander Vandenbroucke

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-09 Daniel Johnson , Trevor Maxfield , Yongxu Jin , Ronald Fedkiw

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

Automatic differentiation (AD) aims to compute derivatives of user-defined functions, but in Turing-complete languages, this simple specification does not fully capture AD's behavior: AD sometimes disagrees with the true derivative of a…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Alexander K. Lew , Mathieu Huot , Vikash K. Mansinghka

Recent theoretical work on automatic differentiation (autodiff) has focused on characteristics such as correctness and efficiency while assuming that all derivatives are automatically generated by autodiff using program transformation, with…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2024-08-15 Sam Estep

Algorithmic Differentiation (AD) can be used to automate the generation of derivatives in arbitrary software projects. This will generate maintainable derivatives, that are always consistent with the computation of the software. If a domain…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Max Sagebaum , Nicolas R. Gauger

Many engineering problems involve learning hidden dynamics from indirect observations, where the physical processes are described by systems of partial differential equations (PDE). Gradient-based optimization methods are considered…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2019-12-17 Kailai Xu , Dongzhuo Li , Eric Darve , Jerry M. Harris

Algorithmic differentiation (AD) tools allow to obtain gradient information of a continuously differentiable objective function in a computationally cheap way using the so-called backward mode. It is common practice to use the same tools…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-12-02 Lukas Baumgärtner , Franz Bethke

Automatic differentiation (AD) is a set of techniques that systematically applies the chain rule to compute the gradients of functions without requiring human intervention. Although the fundamentals of this technology were established…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Afif Boudaoud , Alexandru Calotoiu , Marcin Copik , Torsten Hoefler

This article aims to demonstrate and discuss the applications of automatic differentiation (AD) for finding derivatives in PDE-constrained optimization problems and Jacobians in non-linear finite element analysis. The main idea is to…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-06-03 Julian Andrej , Tzanio Kolev , Boyan Lazarov

Automatic Differentiation (AD) allows to determine exactly the Taylor series of any function truncated at any order. Here we propose to use AD techniques for Monte Carlo data analysis. We discuss how to estimate errors of a general function…

High Energy Physics - Lattice · Physics 2019-02-07 Alberto Ramos

Two of the most important areas in computational finance: Greeks and, respectively, calibration, are based on efficient and accurate computation of a large number of sensitivities. This paper gives an overview of adjoint and automatic…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2011-07-12 Cristian Homescu

Automatic differentiation plays a prominent role in scientific computing and in modern machine learning, often in the context of powerful programming systems. The relation of the various embodiments of automatic differentiation to the…

Programming Languages · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Martin Abadi , Gordon D. Plotkin

Tools for algorithmic differentiation (AD) provide accurate derivatives of computer-implemented functions for use in, e. g., optimization and machine learning (ML). However, they often require the source code of the function to be available…

Mathematical Software · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Max Aehle , Johannes Blühdorn , Max Sagebaum , Nicolas R. Gauger

Stencil loops are a common motif in computations including convolutional neural networks, structured-mesh solvers for partial differential equations, and image processing. Stencil loops are easy to parallelise, and their fast execution is…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-07-08 Jan Hückelheim , Navjot Kukreja , Sri Hari Krishna Narayanan , Fabio Luporini , Gerard Gorman , Paul Hovland

A large class of non-smooth practical optimization problems can be written as minimization of a sum of smooth and partly smooth functions. We examine such structured problems which also depend on a parameter vector and study the problem of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-28 Sheheryar Mehmood , Peter Ochs