Beyond Backpropagation: Optimization with Multi-Tangent Forward Gradients

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Flügel, Katharina, Coquelin, Daniel, Weiel, Marie, Debus, Charlotte, Streit, Achim, Götz, Markus
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908760624070656
author Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
author_facet Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
contents The gradients used to train neural networks are typically computed using backpropagation. While an efficient way to obtain exact gradients, backpropagation is computationally expensive, hinders parallelization, and is biologically implausible. Forward gradients are an approach to approximate the gradients from directional derivatives along random tangents computed by forward-mode automatic differentiation. So far, research has focused on using a single tangent per step. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of multi-tangent forward gradients and introduces an improved approach to combining the forward gradients from multiple tangents based on orthogonal projections. We demonstrate that increasing the number of tangents improves both approximation quality and optimization performance across various tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_17764
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Backpropagation: Optimization with Multi-Tangent Forward Gradients
Flügel, Katharina
Coquelin, Daniel
Weiel, Marie
Debus, Charlotte
Streit, Achim
Götz, Markus
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
The gradients used to train neural networks are typically computed using backpropagation. While an efficient way to obtain exact gradients, backpropagation is computationally expensive, hinders parallelization, and is biologically implausible. Forward gradients are an approach to approximate the gradients from directional derivatives along random tangents computed by forward-mode automatic differentiation. So far, research has focused on using a single tangent per step. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of multi-tangent forward gradients and introduces an improved approach to combining the forward gradients from multiple tangents based on orthogonal projections. We demonstrate that increasing the number of tangents improves both approximation quality and optimization performance across various tasks.
title Beyond Backpropagation: Optimization with Multi-Tangent Forward Gradients
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17764