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DiffTaichi: Differentiable Programming for Physical Simulation

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arxiv 1910.00935 v3 pith:KMUXNCI4 submitted 2019-10-01 cs.LG cs.GRphysics.comp-phstat.ML

classification cs.LGcs.GRphysics.comp-phstat.ML
keywords differentiablelanguagedifftaichiphysicalprogrammingsimulationsimulatorsarithmetic
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We present DiffTaichi, a new differentiable programming language tailored for building high-performance differentiable physical simulators. Based on an imperative programming language, DiffTaichi generates gradients of simulation steps using source code transformations that preserve arithmetic intensity and parallelism. A light-weight tape is used to record the whole simulation program structure and replay the gradient kernels in a reversed order, for end-to-end backpropagation. We demonstrate the performance and productivity of our language in gradient-based learning and optimization tasks on 10 different physical simulators. For example, a differentiable elastic object simulator written in our language is 4.2x shorter than the hand-engineered CUDA version yet runs as fast, and is 188x faster than the TensorFlow implementation. Using our differentiable programs, neural network controllers are typically optimized within only tens of iterations.

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Cited by 12 Pith papers

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