3.14 Forward Propagation, Back Propagation and Computational Graphs¶

• In the previous secitons...
• we calculated the forward propagation of the model
• we calculated the model output for the input
• Then, execute the auto-generated backward function to calculate the gradient
• based on back-propagation
• In this section...
• we will use both mathematical and computational graphs to describe forward and back propagation

3.14.1 Forward Propagation¶

• Forward Propagation

• It refers to the calculation and storage of intermediate variables (including outputs) for the neural network in the order from input layer to output layer.
• Let’s assume that the input example is $\mathbf{x}\in \mathbb{R}^d$ and there is no bias term.
• Here the intermediate variable is

$$\mathbf{z}= \mathbf{W}^{(1)} \mathbf{x}$$ where $\mathbf{W}^{(1)} \in \mathbb{R}^{h \times d}$ is the weight parameter of the hidden layer.

• After entering the intermediate variable $\mathbf{z}\in \mathbb{R}^h$ into the activation function $\phi$ operated by the basic elements
$$\mathbf{h}= \phi (\mathbf{z}).$$
• The hidden variable $\mathbf{h}$ is also an intermediate variable.
• Assuming the parameters of the output layer only possess a weight of $\mathbf{W}^{(2)} \in \mathbb{R}^{q \times h}$, we can obtain an output layer variable with a vector length of $q$,

$$\mathbf{o}= \mathbf{W}^{(2)} \mathbf{h}.$$

• Assuming the loss function is $l$ and the example label is $y$, we can then calculate the loss term for a single data example,

$$L = l(\mathbf{o}, y).$$

• According to the definition of $\ell_2$ norm regularization, given the hyper-parameter $\lambda$, the regularization term is

$$s = \frac{\lambda}{2} \left(|\mathbf{W}^{(1)}|_F^2 + |\mathbf{W}^{(2)}|_F^2\right),$$
where the Frobenius norm of the matrix is equivalent to the calculation of the $L_2$ norm after flattening the matrix to a vector.

• The model's regularized loss on a given data example

$$J = L + s.$$

• We refer to $J$ as the objective function of a given data exampl

3.14.2 Computational Graph of Forward Propagation¶

• Plotting computational graphs helps us visualize the dependencies of operators and variables within the calculation.

3.14.3 Back Propagation¶

• Back propagation refers to the method of calculating the gradient of neural network parameters in the order of the output layer to the input layer according to the ‘chain rule ’in calculus.
• Chain rule
• Assume that we have functions $\mathsf{Y}=f(\mathsf{X})$ and $\mathsf{Z}=g(\mathsf{Y}) = g \circ f(\mathsf{X})$, in which the input and the output $\mathsf{X}, \mathsf{Y}, \mathsf{Z}$ are tensors of arbitrary shapes.
• By using the chain rule we can compute the derivative of $\mathsf{Z}$ wrt. $\mathsf{X}$ via
$$\frac{\partial \mathsf{Z}}{\partial \mathsf{X}} = \text{prod}\left(\frac{\partial \mathsf{Z}}{\partial \mathsf{Y}}, \frac{\partial \mathsf{Y}}{\partial \mathsf{X}}\right).$$
• The parameters of the simple network with one hidden layer are $\mathbf{W}^{(1)}$ and $\mathbf{W}^{(2)}$ ==> The objective of back propagation is to calculate the gradients $\partial J/\partial \mathbf{W}^{(1)}$ and $\partial J/\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}$.
• The first step is to calculate the gradients of the objective function $J=L+s$ with respect to the loss term $L$ and the regularization term $s$.
$$\frac{\partial J}{\partial L} = 1 \text{ and } \frac{\partial J}{\partial s} = 1$$
• Next we compute the gradient of the objective function with respect to variable of the output layer $\mathbf{o}$ according to the chain rule.
$$\frac{\partial J}{\partial \mathbf{o}} = \text{prod}\left(\frac{\partial J}{\partial L}, \frac{\partial L}{\partial \mathbf{o}}\right) = \frac{\partial L}{\partial \mathbf{o}} \in \mathbb{R}^q$$

• Next we calculate the gradients of the regularization term with respect to both parameters.
$$\frac{\partial s}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(1)}} = \lambda \mathbf{W}^{(1)}, \frac{\partial s}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}} = \lambda \mathbf{W}^{(2)} \text{ and } \frac{\partial \mathbf{o}}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}} = \mathbf{h}^\top$$

• Now we are able calculate the gradient $\partial J/\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)} \in \mathbb{R}^{q \times h}$ of the model parameters closest to the output layer. Using the chain rule yields:
$$\frac{\partial J}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}} = \text{prod}\left(\frac{\partial J}{\partial \mathbf{o}}, \frac{\partial \mathbf{o}}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}}\right) + \text{prod}\left(\frac{\partial J}{\partial s}, \frac{\partial s}{\partial \mathbf{W}^{(2)}}\right) = \frac{\partial L}{\partial \mathbf{o}} \mathbf{h}^\top + \lambda \mathbf{W}^{(2)}$$

• and so forth.

3.14.4 Training a Model¶

• When training networks, forward and backward propagation depend on each other.
• For forward propagation we traverse the compute graph in the direction of dependencies and compute all the variables on its path.
• For backpropagation, the variables are used to compute gradients on the graph in reverse order.
• Why backpropagation requires significantly more memory?
• 1) We need to retain the intermediate values until backpropagation is complete.
• 2) we typically train with minibatches containing more than one variable

3.15 Numerical Stability and Initialization¶

• Consider a deep network with $d$ layers, input $\mathbf{x}$ and output $\mathbf{o}$. Each layer satisfies:
$$\mathbf{h}^{t+1} = f_t (\mathbf{h}^t) \text{ and thus } \mathbf{o} = f_d \circ \ldots \circ f_1(\mathbf{x})$$
• The gradient of $\mathbf{o}$ with respect to any set of parameters $\mathbf{W}_t$ associated with the function $f_t$ at layer $t$ simply as
$$\partial_{\mathbf{W}t} \mathbf{o} = \underbrace{\partial_{\mathbf{h}^{d-1}} \mathbf{h}^d}_{:= \mathbf{M}_d} \cdot \ldots \cdot \underbrace{\partial_{\mathbf{h}^{t+1}} \mathbf{h}^{t+2}}_{:= \mathbf{M}_{t+1}} \cdot \underbrace{\partial_{\mathbf{h}^{t}} \mathbf{h}^{t+1}}_{:= \mathbf{M}_t} \cdot \underbrace{\partial_{\mathbf{W}t} \mathbf{h}^t}_{:= \mathbf{v}_t}.$$
• The matrices $M_t$ may well have a wide variety of eigenvalues.
• This means that the optimization algorithm is bound to fail.
• It either receives gradients with excessively large or excessively small steps.
• In the former case, the parameters explode
• In the latter case, we end up with vanishing gradients and no meanigful progress.
• we draw 100 Gaussain random matrices and multiply them with some initial matrix.
In [15]:
%matplotlib inline
import mxnet as mx
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from numpy import linalg as LA

M = nd.random.normal(shape=(4,4))
print('A single matrix', M)
print()

w, v = LA.eig(M.asnumpy())
print(w)

for i in range(100):
M = nd.dot(M, nd.random.normal(shape=(4,4)))

print('After multiplying 100 matrices', M)

A single matrix
[[-5.5410951e-01 -2.5639790e-01 -7.8186011e-01 -1.5031214e+00]
[-1.0607985e+00 -2.5132334e+00  6.5148938e-01 -6.0702908e-01]
[ 5.2347612e-01 -2.0822671e-03  6.1475140e-01  1.4645545e+00]
[ 5.7122988e-01  1.1327640e+00 -5.2853018e-01 -2.0936570e-01]]
<NDArray 4x4 @cpu(0)>

[-1.705154  +0.j         -0.38180867+0.74472266j -0.38180867-0.74472266j
-0.19318593+0.j        ]
After multiplying 100 matrices
[[ 4.1391511e+23  3.2834950e+22 -7.0896819e+21 -1.4974215e+22]
[ 1.6037556e+24  1.2722228e+23 -2.7469440e+22 -5.8018901e+22]
[-1.9988672e+23 -1.5856566e+22  3.4237518e+21  7.2313263e+21]
[-3.6506759e+23 -2.8959967e+22  6.2529075e+21  1.3206971e+22]]
<NDArray 4x4 @cpu(0)>

• Picking 'sigmoid' as nonlinear activation function might be problematic.
• If the activations are not in the range of $[-4, 4]$, the gradients of the overall product may vanish.
• Before ReLu $\max(0,x)$ was proposed, this problem used to be the bane of deep network training.
• As a consequence ReLu has become the default choice when designing activation functions in deep networks.
In [13]:
x = nd.arange(-8.0, 8.0, 0.1)
y = x.sigmoid()
y.backward()

plt.figure(figsize=(8, 4))
plt.plot(x.asnumpy(), y.asnumpy())
plt.show()

• Symmetry
• Assume that we initialize the parameters of a layer as $\mathbf{W}_l = 0$ or all entries of $\mathbf{W}_l$ are identical.
• In this case the gradients for all units in the layer are identical.
• We will never be able to use the expressive power inherent in the layer.
• In fact, the hidden layer behaves as if it had only a single unit.

3.15.2 Parameter Initialization¶

• We can ensure that at least initially the gradients do not vanish and that they are within a reasonable scale where the network weights do not diverge.
• Basic initialization

• net.initialize()

• It use the default random initialization method
• Each element of the weight parameter is randomly sampled with an uniform distribution $U[-0.07, 0.07]$
• Bias parameters are all set to $0$.
• net.initialize(init.Normal(sigma=0.01))

• Pick normally distributed random numbers as initial values for the weights and bias.
• Both choices tend to work quite well in practice for moderate problem sizes.
• Xavier Initialization

• http://proceedings.mlr.press/v9/glorot10a/glorot10a.pdf
• Assume that hidden units of a layer $$h_{i} = \sum_{j=1}^{n_\mathrm{in}} W_{ij} x_j$$
• The weights $W_{ij}$ are all drawn independently from the same distribution.
• Let's assume that this distribution has zero mean and variance $\sigma^2$
• Let's assume that the inputs also have zero mean and variance $\gamma^2$ and that they're independent of $\mathbf{W}$.
• In this case we can compute mean and variance of $h_i$ as follows: \begin{aligned} \mathbf{E}[h_i] & = \sum_{j=1}^{n_\mathrm{in}} \mathbf{E}[W_{ij} x_j] = 0 \\ \mathbf{E}[h_i^2] & = \sum_{j=1}^{n_\mathrm{in}} \mathbf{E}[W^2_{ij} x^2_j] \\ & = \sum_{j=1}^{n_\mathrm{in}} \mathbf{E}[W^2_{ij}] \mathbf{E}[x^2_j] \\ & = n_\mathrm{in} \sigma^2 \gamma^2 \end{aligned}

• One way to keep the variance fixed is to set $n_\mathrm{in} \sigma^2 = 1$.

• When backpropagation is executed, instead of $\mathbf{W} \mathbf{w}$, we need to deal with $\mathbf{W}^\top \mathbf{g}$, where $\mathbf{g}$ is the incoming gradient from the layer above.
• Using the same reasoning, one way to keep the gradients' variance fixed is to set $n_\mathrm{out} \sigma^2 = 1$.
• So, we simply try to satisfy \begin{aligned} \frac{1}{2} (n_\mathrm{in} + n_\mathrm{out}) \sigma^2 = 1 \text{ or equivalently } \sigma = \sqrt{\frac{2}{n_\mathrm{in} + n_\mathrm{out}}} \end{aligned}
• For Gaussian random variables...
• the Xavier initialization picks a normal distribution with zero mean and variance $\sigma^2 = 2/(n_\mathrm{in} + n_\mathrm{out})$.
• For uniformly distributed random variables $U[-a, a]$...
• What do we choose $a$ value?
• Variance $\sigma^2$ is given by $a^2/3$.
• Plugging $a^2/3$ into $\sigma^2$ yields that $a=\sqrt{6/(n_\mathrm{in} + n_\mathrm{out})}$
• Beyond

• The mxnet.initializer package

3.16 Environment¶

• Two important things
• 1) where the data came from
• 2) how the built models get deployed

3.16.1 Covariate Shift¶

• Covariate Shift
• the situation where the distribution over the covariates (aka training data) is shifted on test data relative to the training case
• Mathematically speaking, we are referring the case where $p(x)$ changes but $p(y|x)$ remains unchanged
In [ ]: