Hello. > > Now that I have some time, let me try to make my case clearly. First I want > to say that this is not some attack on the automatic-differentation package. > I love automatic-differentation and symbolic packages. I personally cannot > compute a derivative without a computer for the life of me. And I am also > glad we are finally starting to agree on something :)
I don't think that we disagreed about the fact that there was a problem with the interface to the user application. [_I_ started this thread hinting that there was a problem (at least for me as a user, based on my use-case).] [Then there were several misunderstandings about what was the problem and how to solve it...] > > This discussion is about figuring out how an incorrect framework and storage > affects the performance of an optimization. That is why I am so worried. I can understand that this is an important point for your use-case. There are now two vantage points (at least) on two aspects to consider: You seem to have experience where storage matter (while I don't); you worry about "small" objects allocation (while I don't, anymore). I'm not saying that your worries do not count; quite the contrary. CM is not my "toolbox"; it's a library based on the knowledge of its developers (obviously). If you bring actual use-cases (i.e. unit tests or real application code that can be benchmarked) that will show worrying behaviour, it will certainly trigger swift corrective action. [This has happened recently.] In this area (performance), the problem is that intuition (or educated guess, however you want to name it) is not a substitute for actual runs, sometimes by a large amount. [When I started to use CM, I raised the issue that a 3D vector was immutable (so that I had to create a new one whenever its coordinates were changing). Surely this was a performance hit! Actually it wasn't.] Again, that does not mean that you are wrong in this case. It's just that we cannot jump and change the code every time someone comes up with what amounts to "conventional wisdom". If the person comes with a patch that readily proves the point (at least marginally through microbenchmarking), then we all benefit. > > So lets start with the basics. A Newton method must compute a descent step by > solving a linear equation > > H*p = -g, (1) > > where H is the Hessian, g is the gradient, and p is the desired descent step. > What I am about to say also holds for non-linear least squares method, where > Hessian is approximated using the Jacobian as > > H \approx J^T*J+\lambda I. > > Now, if you are not solving a simple optimization problem that you keep > giving examples for, you can easily have a Hessian be a very large matrix, > like 1000x1000 or larger. Now, you better hope that you are storing H using > your linear algebra framework, otherwise eq. (1) computation is going to take > a while. > This is actually a very active area of research, and that is why having > sparse linear algebra (aren't you removing this? ;) ) and iterative solvers > is important to a lot of people. Yes we are removing it because it is buggy and _nobody_ stepped up to say that it was important for CM users, and to help solve the problems in a way consistent with real-life usage of such a feature. As Sébastien said, you are warmly welcome to help us find a way to keep the feature. > > What you are proposing as good OO style This discussion has really nothing to do with "OO style", merely code reuse; and it was my big misunderstanding (partly because of my lack of knowledge, partly because of the lack of documentation on the targetted usages of "DerivativeStructure", which IIUC now, are outside CM) that I believed that the new "MultivariateDifferentiableFunction" was the way to go. [Also, Luc had been moving very fast on this. And I couldn't keep up although I had wondered earlier why this had to impact usage in the "optimization" package.] > is that if someone has a function that they want to optimize, they need to > take what is probably already a RealMatrix or [][], and create 1000x1000 > DerivativeStructure objects, that, IIUC, that would be 1000 "DerivativeStructure" (not 1000x1000). If so, for this example, using "DerivativeStructure" would lead to about a 4% increase in storage memory. > within the next 10 lines in the optimizer, are going to be converted back to > a RealMatrix? Not only have you just fragmented your heap space, but your > garbage collector > is going crazy, and you are wasting an incredible amount of memory. This is the kind of assertions that really needs support from actual code. [Again, I don't claim to know better; I think that it would really be useful to accumulate a list of "do and don't" for Java and CM, in the form of reproducible user experience.] > Now imagine if your Jacobian is actually very simple to compute but large, > then this whole conversion back and forth actually takes much longer than the > function evaluation. We are willing to take this into account, but since I cannot see the behaviour in my use-case (where the evaluation time overwhelms, by several orders of magnitude, all such considerations), I do not have any incentive to change what seems to be "efficient enough" (for the actually known cases). Again, your experience with other use-cases would be very valuable to analyze the efficiency of the CM implementations and improve them, if necessary. > > So, why exactly are you insisting on taking this performance penalty? It's the other way around. Until the performance penalty is proven, we've decided that it's up to the developer willing to do the work to decide. Again, if there is patch, it makes the matter much easier to decide on. I admit that we decided to change the internal working of the optimizers, so _we_ should have proved that it does not impact usability. Hence, again, the usefulness of having a test suite of "real" applications which could be benchmarked regularly in order to have performance regressions induced by otherwise welcome changes. [I raised that issue several times on the ML.] > You claim that the optimizer can work better if it gets a > DerivativeStructure, why? This was (supposed to be) an improvement of the _internal_ design. [Several weeks ago, Luc posted the problems he was encountering.] > Where is the fact that you are holding a DerivativeStructure come into effect > for a Newton method? Can you provide any literature in that regard? The > classical optimization bottleneck, if not the actual function evaluation, is > eq. (1). The optimization methodology is build on top of years of research in > computational linear algebra concepts, and does not care how the matrices are > actually computed. Efficient memory usage and speed is critical here because > in Newton optimizations eq. (1) is evaluated thousands of times. The goal of > the Jacobian is not to store derivatives it is to store a matrix of numbers > that allows you to quadratically approximate your target function. OK. Then Luc's proposal seems appropriate. There would be new interfaces defining the "optimize" method appropriately. For algorithms that need the gradient, it must be provided in an additional argument, of type "MultivariateVectorFunction"; for those that need, the Jacobian, the argument would be of type "MultivariateMatrixFunction". Do you agree? > > You guys are focusing on people using finite differences and trying to > optimize a newton method to use finite differences. This is not what the main > purpose of a newton method is. If you want a method that dynamically adjusts > finite differences step size, you should switch to BOBYQA, which was designed > for this case. Another misunderstanding probably. [The "stepSize" discussion was sort of a digression.] > > Derivatives can be computed by a computer using a symbolic toolbox a priori > (something that I was referring to when I accidentally said > auto-differenation). They can also be efficiently simplified by that toolbox > before being pasted back into you program. Auto-diff could also be an > important tool for people if their problem is simple or they are not > concerned with optimal efficiency . This can easily be handled by a wrapper > and has nothing to do with Newton optimization. Maybe we should also change the "NewtonSolver" (in package "o.a.c.m.analysis.solvers"). [In the same way we'll do for the optimizer with derivatives. Actually those two packages were improved in parallel so that the interface would be very similar from a usage point of view.] > If you want to talk about proper OO design and internal simplification then > you should focus on being able to pass a linear solver into your optimization > method. This way you allow people to use iterative and sparse solvers when > needed. This is a new feature; contributions are welcome. [CM is primarily developed by people who use (part of) it; if they don't need that feature, or don't know how to implement it, or do not have the time to implement it, it won't be implemented.] > If you are concerned about people getting derivatives wrong, you can do what > MATLAB does, which is to add an option to check the derivatives using finite > differences when debugging. IMHO, the top-priority feature to help in debugging is to introduce logging statments! > > This brings me to my second issue. There are important problems where > computation > of the derivatives combined with the actual function evaluation is > *significantly* > faster than computing each alone. I am not clear why I am hitting such > resistance > with this. [...] [If you think that you were met with strong resistance, I'd suggest that you look in the archives for the discussions about exceptions in CM...] Unless I'm mistaken, CM does not prevent you to write a class that takes advantage of combining the computations. > What I suggested as function interfaces was just an initial quick suggestion > that I would be happy for anyone to change in a way that everyone feels > positive > about. I just don't want my second issue to be ignored like a non-issue. I'm getting confused. Could you please restate what where those first and second issue? Thanks, Gilles --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@commons.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@commons.apache.org
