Efficient Higher Order Derivatives of Objective Functions Composed of Matrix Operations

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the efficient evaluation of higher-order derivatives of functions $f$ that are composed of matrix operations. I.e., we want to compute the $D$-th derivative tensor $\nabla^D f(X) \in \mathbb R^{N^D}$, where $f:\mathbb R^{N} \to \mathbb R$ is given as an algorithm that consists of many matrix operations. We propose a method that is a combination of two well-known techniques from Algorithmic Differentiation (AD): univariate Taylor propagation on scalars (UTPS) and first-order forward and reverse on matrices. The combination leads to a technique that we would like to call univariate Taylor propagation on matrices (UTPM). The method inherits many desirable properties: It is easy to implement, it is very efficient and it returns not only $\nabla^D f$ but yields in the process also the derivatives $\nabla^d f$ for $d \leq D$. As performance test we compute the gradient $\nabla f(X)$ % and the Hessian $\nabla_A^2 f(A)$ by a combination of forward and reverse mode of $f(X) = \trace (X^{-1})$ in the reverse mode of AD for $X \in \mathbb R^{n \times n}$. We observe a speedup of about 100 compared to UTPS. Due to the nature of the method, the memory footprint is also small and therefore can be used to differentiate functions that are not accessible by standard methods due to limited physical memory.