AISTATS 2020poster20 citations

Modular Block-diagonal Curvature Approximations for Feedforward Architectures

Felix Dangel, Stefan Harmeling, Philipp Hennig

Abstract

We propose a modular extension of backpropagation for the computation of block-diagonal approximations to various curvature matrices of the training objective (in particular, the Hessian, generalized Gauss-Newton, and positive-curvature Hessian). The approach reduces the otherwise tedious manual derivation of these matrices into local modules, and is easy to integrate into existing machine learning libraries. Moreover, we develop a compact notation derived from matrix differential calculus. We outline different strategies applicable to our method. They subsume recently-proposed block-diagonal approximations as special cases, and are extended to convolutional neural networks in this work.

BibTeX
@InProceedings{pmlr-v108-dangel20a,
  title = 	 { Modular Block-diagonal Curvature Approximations for Feedforward Architectures},
  author =       {Dangel, Felix and Harmeling, Stefan and Hennig, Philipp},
  booktitle = 	 {Proceedings of the Twenty Third International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics},
  pages = 	 {799--808},
  year = 	 {2020},
  editor = 	 {Chiappa, Silvia and Calandra, Roberto},
  volume = 	 {108},
  series = 	 {Proceedings of Machine Learning Research},
  month = 	 {26--28 Aug},
  publisher =    {PMLR},
  pdf = 	 {http://proceedings.mlr.press/v108/dangel20a/dangel20a.pdf},
  url = 	 {https://proceedings.mlr.press/v108/dangel20a.html},
  abstract = 	 {We propose a modular extension of backpropagation for the computation of block-diagonal approximations to various curvature matrices of the training objective (in particular, the Hessian, generalized Gauss-Newton, and positive-curvature Hessian). The approach reduces the otherwise tedious manual derivation of these matrices into local modules, and is easy to integrate into existing machine learning libraries. Moreover, we develop a compact notation derived from matrix differential calculus. We outline different strategies applicable to our method. They subsume recently-proposed block-diagonal approximations as special cases, and are extended to convolutional neural networks in this work.}
}
Modular Block-diagonal Curvature Approximations for Feedforward Architectures · AISTATS 2020