JuliaDiff / JuliaDiff/ReverseDiff.jl

Generalizing taping infrastructure (e.g. tools for recording execution traces)

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priority
Dominant language
Julia
Stars
393
Forks
60
Avg merge
18h 24m
Merged PRs (30d)
8

Description

From the Discourse announcement I made a while back:

Internally, ReverseDiff contains facilities for recording execution traces of native Julia code to reusable, compilable instruction tapes, as well as mechanisms for propagating values "forwards" and "backwards" through these tapes. Since these tapes can be analyzed as computation graphs, my hope is that this infrastructure can eventually be rendered useful for non-AD purposes, such as performance optimization, scheduled parallel execution, and constraint programming.

I've opened this issue to track this effort. Right now, TrackedArrays/TrackedReals and the instruction tape are written specifically for differentiation purposes. It will require a lot of thought and experimentation to figure out the right way to restructure this code to be generally useful for non-AD purposes. Eventually, this code might be factored out of ReverseDiff and into a different package.

cc @dpsanders (who might someday find this stuff useful for interval constraint programming).

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by examining the TrackedArray and TrackedReal implementations and the instruction tape described in this issue, then read the linked Discourse announcement for context. The work is exploratory: determine how to restructure the differentiation-specific infrastructure for broader uses such as execution-trace analysis, and whether it should eventually move into another package.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
julia
Domain
tooling
Issue type
Refactor
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
20/100

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