5,816 research outputs found
Automatic differentiation in machine learning: a survey
Derivatives, mostly in the form of gradients and Hessians, are ubiquitous in
machine learning. Automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic
differentiation or simply "autodiff", is a family of techniques similar to but
more general than backpropagation for efficiently and accurately evaluating
derivatives of numeric functions expressed as computer programs. AD is a small
but established field with applications in areas including computational fluid
dynamics, atmospheric sciences, and engineering design optimization. Until very
recently, the fields of machine learning and AD have largely been unaware of
each other and, in some cases, have independently discovered each other's
results. Despite its relevance, general-purpose AD has been missing from the
machine learning toolbox, a situation slowly changing with its ongoing adoption
under the names "dynamic computational graphs" and "differentiable
programming". We survey the intersection of AD and machine learning, cover
applications where AD has direct relevance, and address the main implementation
techniques. By precisely defining the main differentiation techniques and their
interrelationships, we aim to bring clarity to the usage of the terms
"autodiff", "automatic differentiation", and "symbolic differentiation" as
these are encountered more and more in machine learning settings.Comment: 43 pages, 5 figure
Group Communication Patterns for High Performance Computing in Scala
We developed a Functional object-oriented Parallel framework (FooPar) for
high-level high-performance computing in Scala. Central to this framework are
Distributed Memory Parallel Data structures (DPDs), i.e., collections of data
distributed in a shared nothing system together with parallel operations on
these data. In this paper, we first present FooPar's architecture and the idea
of DPDs and group communications. Then, we show how DPDs can be implemented
elegantly and efficiently in Scala based on the Traversable/Builder pattern,
unifying Functional and Object-Oriented Programming. We prove the correctness
and safety of one communication algorithm and show how specification testing
(via ScalaCheck) can be used to bridge the gap between proof and
implementation. Furthermore, we show that the group communication operations of
FooPar outperform those of the MPJ Express open source MPI-bindings for Java,
both asymptotically and empirically. FooPar has already been shown to be
capable of achieving close-to-optimal performance for dense matrix-matrix
multiplication via JNI. In this article, we present results on a parallel
implementation of the Floyd-Warshall algorithm in FooPar, achieving more than
94 % efficiency compared to the serial version on a cluster using 100 cores for
matrices of dimension 38000 x 38000
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