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Who Invented Backpropagation?

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Re: Who Invented Backpropagation?

#5
As it is stated, I always thought it came from formulations like Euler-Lagrange procedures in mechanics used in numeric methods for differential geometry. In fact when I recreated the algorithm as an exercise it immediately reminded me of gradient descent for kinematics, with the Jacobian calculation for each layer similar to an iterative pose calculation in generalized coordinates. I never thought it was something "novel".

Re: Who Invented Backpropagation?

#6

> BP's modern version (also called the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) So... Automatic integration? Proportional, integrative, derivative. A PID loop sure sounds like what they're talking about.

Reverse move automatic differentiation is not integration. It's still differentiation, but just a different method of calculating the derivative than the one you'd think to do by hand. It basically just applies the chain rule in the opposite order from what is intuitive to people.

It has a lot more overhead than regular forwards mode autodiff because you need to cache values from running the function and refer back to them in reverse order, but the advantage is that for function with many many inputs and very few outputs (i.e. the classic example is calculating the gradient of a scalar function in a high dimensional space like for gradient descent), it is algorithmically more efficient and requires only one pass through the primal function.

On the other hand, traditional forwards mode derivatives are most efficient for functions with very few inputs, but many outputs. It's essentially a duality relationship.

Re: Who Invented Backpropagation?

#7

> BP's modern version (also called the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) So... Automatic integration? Proportional, integrative, derivative. A PID loop sure sounds like what they're talking about.

Forward mode automatic differentiation creates a formula for each scalar derivative. If you have a billion parameters you have to calculate each derivative from scratch.

As the name implies, the calculation is done forward.

Reverse mode automatic differentiation starts from the root of the symbolic expression and calculates the derivative for each subexpression simultaneously.

The difference between the two is like the difference between calculating the Fibonacci sequence recursively without memoization and calculating it iteratively. You avoid doing redundant work over and over again.

Re: Who Invented Backpropagation?

#8
I have a question that's bothered me for quite a while now. In 2018, Michael Jordan (UC Berkeley) wrote a rather interesting essay - https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-re... (Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet)

In it, he stated the following:

> Indeed, the famous “backpropagation” algorithm that was rediscovered by David Rumelhart in the early 1980s, and which is now viewed as being at the core of the so-called “AI revolution,” first arose in the field of control theory in the 1950s and 1960s. One of its early applications was to optimize the thrusts of the Apollo spaceships as they headed towards the moon.

I was wondering whether anyone could point me to the paper or piece of work he was referring to. There are many citations in Schmidhuber’s piece, and in my previous attempts I've gotten lost in papers.

Re: Who Invented Backpropagation?

#10
post #8

I have a question that's bothered me for quite a while now. In 2018, Michael Jordan (UC Berkeley) wrote a rather interesting essay - https://medium.com/@mijordan3/artificial-intelligence-the-re... (Artificial Intelligence — The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet) In it, he stated the following: > Indeed, the famous “backpropagation” algorithm that was rediscovered by David Rumelhart in the early 1980s, and which is now v…

I found this,maybe it helps: https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/1986-rumelhart-2.pdf
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