JuliaGeometry / JuliaGeometry/Rotations.jl

Support automatic differentiation with Zygote

Open
#129 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

differentiation
Dominant language
Julia
Stars
188
Forks
45
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

Supporting reverse-mode autodiff with Zygote requires two things:

  • custom pullbacks (reverse-mode differentiation rules, AKA adjoints) for functions that internally mutate arrays (Zygote does not support array mutation)
  • custom pullbacks for constructors

I think the latter is the main thing missing for Zygote support. Supporting it would require adding custom rrules for constructors using ChainRulesCore, which has essentially no dependencies.

Here's an example that fails:

julia> using Rotations, Zygote

julia> foo(ω, v) = (RotationVec(ω...) * v)[1];

julia> ω, v = randn(3), randn(3)
([-0.5124874613220701, 0.27274002772526423, 1.0593705312514463], [-0.2329525748114141, -1.1183670007323072, -0.4878065893106537])

julia> foo(ω, v)
0.8904209135865043

julia> Zygote.gradient(foo, ω, v) # expected from finite differences: ([-0.18142454901446126, -0.16476417425397563, 0.8182962760715483], [0.47098619925782836, -0.8816660765248943, -0.028929735807022527])
ERROR: Need an adjoint for constructor RotationVec{Float64}. Gradient is of type Array{Float64,2}

In this case mathematically the missing pullback is for the exponential map exp: so(3) → SO(3).

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

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 reproducing the Julia/Zygote example in the issue and inspect the RotationVec constructor, along with ChainRulesCore's rrule mechanism. Done means constructor pullbacks are available for the relevant rotation types, including the exponential-map case, and the example can compute the expected gradients without an adjoint error.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
julia
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.