A Common Interface for Automatic Differentiation

Abstract

For scientific machine learning tasks with a lot of custom code, picking the right Automatic Differentiation (AD) system matters. Our Julia package DifferentiationInterface$.$jl provides a common frontend to a dozen AD backends, unlocking easy comparison and modular development. In particular, its built-in preparation mechanism leverages the strengths of each backend by amortizing one-time computations. This is key to enabling sophisticated features like sparsity handling without putting additional burdens on the user.