Quick example

With NNGeometry, you can easily manipulate \(d \times d\) matrices and \(d\) vectors where \(d\) is the number of parameter of your neural network, for modern neural networks where \(d\) can be as big as \(10^8\). These matrices include for instance:

  • The Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) used in statistics, in the natural gradient algorithm, or as an approximate of the Hessian matrix in some applications.

  • Posterior covariances in Bayesian Deep Learning.

You can also compute finite tangent kernels.

A naive computation of the FIM would require storing \(d \times d\) scalars in memory. This is prohibitively large for modern neural network architectures, and a line of research has focused at finding lower memory intensive approximations specific to neural networks, such as KFAC, EKFAC, low-rank approximations, etc. This library proposes a common interface for manipulating these different approximations, called representations.

Let us now illustrate this by computing the FIM using the KFAC representation.

>>> F_kfac = FIM(model=model,
                 loader=loader,
                 representation=PMatKFAC,
                 n_output=10,
                 variant='classif_logits',
                 device='cuda')
>>> print(F_kfac.trace())

Computing the FIM requires the following arguments:

  • The torch.nn.Module model object is the PyTorch model used as our neural network.

  • The torch.utils.data.DataLoader loader object is the dataloader that contains examples used for computing the FIM.

  • The object.PMatKFAC PMatKFAC argument specifies which representation to use in order to store the FIM.

We will next define a vector in parameter space, by using the current value given by our model:

>>> v = PVector.from_model(model)

We can now compute the matrix-vector product \(F v\) by simply calling:

>>> Fv = F_kfac.mv(v)

Note that switching from the object.PMatKFAC representation to any other representation such as object.PMatDense is as simple as passing representation=PMatDense when building the F_kfac object.

More examples

More notebook examples can be found at https://github.com/tfjgeorge/nngeometry/tree/master/examples