This repo contains an unofficial implementation of the paper Gradients without backpropagation.

In this paper, a way to compute gradients by only using the forward pass is described and 2 use cases are provided:

1. The global optimization of two famous funtions: Beale and Rosenbrok functions.
2. The well known classification task on the MNIST dataset.

In our implementation, we used the brand new functorch. Thanks to this library, the model can be treated as a function of its parameters. With this change of perspective, the Jvp of the model can be computed (for a brief explanation of what the Jvp of a function is, check below).

We tested the above implementation on the same examples provided by the paper.

The Jvp is the product of the Jacobian J of the model, derived with respect of the parameters, and a vector v called perturbation vector with the same size of the parameters vector. Entries of v are independent from each other and sampled from a Normal distribution with mean 0 and variance 1.

For running the optimization, simply clone the repository and, after moving to the repo root, use the command python <name_of_the_example.py>.

For both the MNIST examples you can visualize the training progress with tensorboard: tensorboard --logdir outputs

All the examples are implemented both with the new forward gradient method and with backpropagation. To let the two implementations be as similar as possible, we used the rewritten Pytorch operations also for the backpropagation examples (even if, in this case, Pytorch would support those operators).

All the configurations are managed using Hydra. Configuration files are stored in the /configs folder.

For changing the global optimization example, modify the global_optim_config.yaml file.

Changing something in the MNIST example can be easily achieved by adding configuration files in the respective subfolder and changing the config.yaml file. These configurations can be used to change:

1. The dataset's specific, like batch size or the shuffling parameter (/dataset subfolder).
2. The neural network architecture (/model subfolder). Here two models are provided:
   1. A Multilayer Perceptron inside the default configuration
   2. A Convolutional NN inside conv.yaml
3. The optimization process parameters (/optimization subfolder).

Follow Hydra's documentation to know more about how to manage configurations.

Even if in the paper the forward implementation proved to be faster, in our case we did not notice a speed-up. Convergence is still achieved in all the examples with roughly the same amount of steps, but backpropagation's steps are faster than the fwdgrad ones.

The next graph shows the loss on the train dataset obtained with the following

python mnist_<optimization_type>.py dataset.batch_size=1024 optimization.learning_rate=5e-4

where <optimization_type> is one of fwdgrad or backprop

The accuracies on the test set are:

• 15/04/2023: update functorch using directly torch-2.0.0

This project is licensed under the MIT License

Copyright (c) 2022 Federico Belotti, Davide Angioni, Orobix Srl (www.orobix.com).