Hessian and the bilinear form

Hessian of a function is the Jacobian of the Jacobian of the function. A function has a Jacobian of shape which is a function of . Thus one can imagine a mapping . The Jacobian of will have a shape of . This is the Hessian of the function .

We start with calculation of the entire Jacobian matrix, something we have avoided so far.

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0. Calculating the Jacobian matrix

We use the inverse function to calculate the Jacobian matrix. First let's calculate the Jacobian using PyTorch as a reference:

Python implementation

import torch
from torch.autograd.functional import jacobian

def inverse(x):
    return torch.linalg.inv(x)

x = torch.randn(100,100)

j_x = jacobian(inverse, x)

Now remember the JVP of the inverse function:

This is the compressed (or reshaped) form of the vectorized form of the JVP. Now note that . Using this trick, we can calculate the i-th column of the Jacobian matrix:

Verification using Python

i = 1234
# construct a basis vector
basis_vector_i = torch.zeros(100,100)
row = i % 100
col = i // 100
basis_vector_i[row,col] = 1

jacobian_column_i = -y @ basis_vector_i @ y
# need to transpose since pytorch follows row-major order
# also need to transpose the indices of `j_x`
assert torch.allclose(jacobian_column_i, j_x[col, row].t())

One could then iterate over the columns to calculate the full Jacobian matrix.

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0.1 Faster calculation by batching

A faster way to calculate the Jacobian matrix is to use batching and calculate in one go.

Verification using Python

eye = torch.eye(10000,10000).view(10000,100,100)
j_manual = -y.unsqueeze(0) @ eye @ y.unsqueeze(0)

# the first two dimensions of `j_x` seem to be arranged in column-major order
# `j_manual.view(100,100, ...)` reshapes in row-major order
# so we need to transpose the first two dimensions
j_manual = j_manual.view(100,100,100,100).transpose(0,1)

assert torch.allclose(j_manual, j_x.transpose(-1,-2))

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0.2 Calculating rows vs columns

We used JVP to calculate each column of the Jacobian at a time. One could also calculate each row of the Jacobian at a time using the VJP since .

Remember that the VJP of the inverse function is:

One can then use the same procedure as above to calculate the rows of the Jacobian matrix (try it yourself).

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1. Hessian matrix

Let be the gradient of . Consider the function written in matrix notation:

The Jacobian of is the Hessian of :

We could expand each term in the above matrix to get a more standard form.

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1.1 Hessian is symmetric

There are two ways to look at it. First, the second derivative is symmetric:

Second, we can calculate how a change in affects a change in :

But since a scalar is its own transpose, we get .

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1.2 Bilinear form

Now let's take a look at the LHS of the above expression:

The obvious interpretation of this value is that it is the change in (change in f) at two points and . At each point you change the input by and measure the change in output, say . The bilinear form is the difference between the two: . Since are interchangeable, we can swap them in the above argument, so the bilinear form can be seen as the difference .

First apply , then measure the change at each end: this gives and .

Now swap the order, applying first and then : the bilinear form is the same difference .

Hessian is used in optimization by using second order approximation:

In machine learning, it is used in quantization of large models. Check out optimal brain compression for more information.

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2. Calculating a Hessian in PyTorch

Since Hessian is just the grad of the grad of a scalar-valued function, one can simply take the gradient of the gradient of a scalar-valued function. The only trick to be aware of is that one needs to be able to have a DAG for a function that maps the input to the gradient of the function. Once that is taken care of, the rest is standard PyTorch autograd.grad stuff.

In the example below, we calculate the Hessian of :

Verification using Python

import torch
from torch.autograd import grad
from torch.autograd.functional import hessian

def f(x):
    return x[0]**2 * x[1] + torch.sin(x.sum())

x = torch.rand(2, requires_grad=True)
y = f(x)

# `create_graph=True` is important!
g = grad(y, x, create_graph=True)[0]
first_row_of_hessian = grad(g, x, grad_outputs=torch.Tensor([1,0]), retain_graph=True)[0]
second_row_of_hessian = grad(g, x, grad_outputs=torch.Tensor([0,1]))[0]

hessian_manual = torch.stack([first_row_of_hessian, second_row_of_hessian], dim=0)
hessian_torch = hessian(f, x)
assert torch.allclose(hessian_manual, hessian_torch)

One may have noticed that since we calculated each row of the Hessian at a time, we actually used the vjp function to calculate the gradient of the gradient of a scalar-valued function. Since the Hessian is a square matrix, it may be better to use the jvp function to calculate each column of the Hessian at a time since it does not have any memory overhead. JAX documentation provides more details on how and when to use the jvp and vjp functions.

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← VJP and JVP