A Quasilinear Algorithm for Computing Higher-Order Derivatives of Deep Feed-Forward Neural Networks

arXiv:2412.09752v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The use of neural networks for solving differential equations is practically difficult due to the exponentially increasing runtime of autodifferentiation when computing high-order derivatives. We propose $n$-TangentProp, the natural extension of the TangentProp formalism cite{simard1991tangent} to arbitrarily many derivatives. $n$-TangentProp computes the exact derivative $d^n/dx^n f(x)$ in quasilinear, instead of exponential time, for a densely connected, feed-forward neural network $f$ with a smooth, parameter-free activation function. We validate our algorithm empirically across a range of depths, widths, and number of derivatives. We demonstrate that our method is particularly beneficial in the context of physics-informed neural networks where ntp allows for significantly faster training times than previous methods and has favorable scaling with respect to both model size and loss-function complexity as measured by the number of required derivatives. The code for this paper can be found at https://github.com/kyrochi/n_tangentprop.



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