Differentiating Through Linear Solvers

Abstract

Computer programs containing calls to linear solvers are a known challenge for automatic differentiation. Previous publications advise against differentiating through the low-level solver implementation, and instead advocate for high-level approaches that express the derivative in terms of a modified linear system that can be solved with a separate solver call. Despite this ubiquitous advice, we are not aware of prior work comparing the accuracy of both approaches. With this article we thus empirically study a simple question: What happens if we ignore common wisdom, and differentiate through linear solvers?