# Recursive custom gradients in TensorFlow

Most autodifferentiation libraries, such as PyTorch, TensorFlow, Autograd — and even PennyLane in the quantum case — allow you to create new functions and register custom gradients that the autodiff framework makes use of during backpropagation. This is useful in several cases; perhaps you have a composite function with a gradient that is more stable than naively applying the chain rule to all constituent operations, or perhaps the function you would like to define cannot be written in terms of native framework operations.

While this functionality is super useful, especially in quantum differentiable programming, it tends to be somewhat under-documented and under-utilized in ‘classical’ machine learning. And while most autodiff frameworks provide (small) examples of custom gradients for first derivatives, there is very little information out there for supporting higher-order derivatives.

In fact, if our custom function has periodicity, we can likely define the custom gradient recursively, and support arbitrary nth order derivatives!

Let’s imagine a world where TensorFlow accidentally shipped without sine and cosine support, and see if we can define a custom gradient to support arbitrary nth order derivatives.

So, we’ve imported TensorFlow, executed tf.sin(), and our heart sank as Python responded

>>> tf.sin()
AttributeError: module 'tensorflow' has no attribute 'sin'


Shit! No worries, though, we can use the @tf.custom_gradient decorator, the ever-reliable NumPy, and the fact that

$$\frac{d}{dx}\sin(x) = \cos(x)$$

to define an autodiff-supporting sine function for TensorFlow:

import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf

def sin(x):
# nested function that returns the
# vector-Jacobian product
return dy * np.cos(x.numpy())


This is a great drop in replacement for our missing sine functionality:

>>> weights = tf.Variable([0.4, 0.1, 0.2])
...     res = sin(weights)
>>> print(res)
tf.Tensor([0.38941833 0.09983342 0.19866933], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)
tf.Tensor([0.921061  0.9950042 0.9800666], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)


What happens if we would like the second derivative, however?

>>> with tf.GradientTape() as tape1:
...         res = sin(weights)
None


😬

Because the custom gradient we are returning uses a NumPy function np.cos, TensorFlow does not know how to differentiate the returned custom gradient.

No worries! We can fix this by simply registering the gradient of the custom gradient! (Note: the TensorFlow @tf.custom_decorator documentation has an example of defining a second derivative this way, but as far as I can tell, it appears incorrect).

@tf.custom_gradient
def sin(x):
def first_order(dy):

def jacobian(a):
def hessian(ddy):
return ddy * -np.sin(a.numpy())
return np.cos(a.numpy()), hessian

return dy * jacobian(x)
return np.sin(x.numpy()), first_order


Here, we are using the fact that $$\frac{d^2}{dx^2}\sin(x) = -\sin(x)$$, and defining a new jacobian() function that itself has its custom gradient (the Hessian) defined. This now works as required:

>>> with tf.GradientTape() as tape1:
...         res = sin(weights)
tf.Tensor([-0.38941833 -0.09983342 -0.19866933], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)


However, say we wanted the third derivative? This would now return None, since we have only defined up until the second derivative! To support the third derivative would require three levels of custom-gradient nesting; similarly, for $$n$$ derivatives, we need $$n$$ levels of nesting.

## The parameter-shift rule

Using the trig identity $$\sin(a+b) - \sin(a-b) = 2\cos(a)\sin(b)$$, we can write the derivative of the sine function in a form that is more suited to higher derivatives:

$$\frac{d}{dx}\sin(x) = \cos(x) = \frac{\sin(x+s) - \sin(x-s)}{2\sin(s)}, ~~~ s\in \mathbb{R}.$$

In particular, the derivative of $$\sin(x)$$ is now written in terms of a linear combination of calls to the same function, just with shifted parameters!1 This leads to a really neat idea: if we define a sine function with custom gradient in terms of itself, will it allow for arbitrary $$n$$-th derivatives in TensorFlow?

Let’s give it a shot.

@tf.custom_gradient
def sin(x, shift=np.pi/2):
c = 1.0 / (2 * np.sin(shift))

jacobian = c * (sin(x + shift, shift=shift) - sin(x - shift, shift=shift))
return dy * jacobian



Note that we only have one level of nesting (so we are only registering the first derivative), but we are defining the first derivative by recursively calling the original function.

Does this work? Attempting to compute the third derivative:

>>> with tf.GradientTape() as tape1:
...             res = sin(weights)
tf.Tensor([-0.38941827 -0.0998335  -0.19866937], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)


Amazing! And it agrees exactly with the known third derivative:

>>> print(-tf.sin(weights))
tf.Tensor([-0.38941833 -0.09983342 -0.19866933], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)


We can construct a more complicated model, where we are even calling our custom sine function with different shift values, and compute the full Hessian matrix:

with tf.GradientTape(persistent=True) as tape1:
y = tf.stack([weights[1] * weights[2], weights[2], weights[0]])
res = sin(weights, shift=np.pi/4) + 3 * sin(y, shift=np.pi/2) ** 2
print("Result:", res)



Out:

Result: tf.Tensor([0.39061818 0.21824193 0.6536093 ], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)
Gradient: tf.Tensor([3.0731294 1.0189977 2.1603184], shape=(3,), dtype=float32)
Hessian:
tf.Tensor(
[[3.7908227  0.         0.        ]
[0.         0.13997458 0.23987202]
[0.         0.23987202 5.3876476 ]], shape=(3, 3), dtype=float32)


## Final note

While this is a neat trick for defining custom gradients that support arbitrary derivatives (as long as the derivative can be written as a linear combination of the original function!), it is often not the most efficient method. To see why, consider the derivative of a function $$f(x)$$ satisfying a parameter-shift rule:

\begin{align} \frac{d^2}{dx^2}f(x) &= c \frac{d}{dx}f(x+s) - c \frac{d}{dx}f(x-s)\\[7pt] &= \left[c^2 (f(x+2s)-f(x)) \right] - \left[c^2 (f(x)-f(x-2 s)\right]. \end{align}

TensorFlow will be naively performing four evaluations of the original function in order to compute the second derivative; whereas if done symbolically, we can see that some terms would cancel out or combine without even needing to perform all evaluations:

$$\frac{d^2}{dx^2}f(x) = c^2 \left[ f(x+2s) - 2f(x) + f(x-2s) \right].$$

And that’s not all; given the periodicity of the function $$f(x)$$, there are often even further optimizations that can be made for a specific shift value $$s$$; for example being able to cache and re-use previous function evaluations computed during the first derivative.

So while the recursive custom gradient is a neat trick, it’s probably always better to manually nest the custom gradients. Especially if evaluating $$f(x)$$ is a bottleneck! 2

1. The parameter-shift rule is an important result for quantum machine learning and variational algorithms, as it allows analytic quantum gradients to be computed on quantum hardware. For more details, see Evaluating analytic gradients on quantum hardware, the PennyLane glossary, or this tutorial I wrote on quantum gradients
2. Higher-order quantum gradients using the paramter-shift rule was explored in Estimating the gradient and higher-order derivatives on quantum hardware. Check it out if you are curious to see some of the optimizations that can be made when computing the Hessian.