matrix determinant differentiation in tensorflow

Question

I am interested in computing the derivative of a matrix determinant using TensorFlow. I can see from experimentation that TensorFlow has not implemented a method of differen

Answer 1

Please check "Implement Gradient in Python" section here

In particular, you can implement it as follows

@ops.RegisterGradient("MatrixDeterminant")
def _MatrixDeterminantGrad(op, grad):
  """Gradient for MatrixDeterminant. Use formula from 2.2.4 from
  An extended collection of matrix derivative results for forward and reverse
  mode algorithmic differentiation by Mike Giles
  -- http://eprints.maths.ox.ac.uk/1079/1/NA-08-01.pdf
"""
  A = op.inputs[0]
  C = op.outputs[0]
  Ainv = tf.matrix_inverse(A)
  return grad*C*tf.transpose(Ainv)

Then a simple training loop to check that it works:

a0 = np.array([[1,2],[3,4]]).astype(np.float32)
a = tf.Variable(a0)
b = tf.square(tf.matrix_determinant(a))
init_op = tf.initialize_all_variables()
sess = tf.InteractiveSession()
init_op.run()

minimization_steps = 50
learning_rate = 0.001
optimizer = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate)
train_op = optimizer.minimize(b)

losses = []
for i in range(minimization_steps):
  train_op.run()
  losses.append(b.eval())

Then you can visualize your loss over time

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.ylabel("Determinant Squared")
plt.xlabel("Iterations")
plt.plot(losses)

Should see something like this