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Efficient symbolic differentiation for graphics applications

Published:29 July 2007Publication History
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Abstract

Functions with densely interconnected expression graphs, which arise in computer graphics applications such as dynamics, space-time optimization, and PRT, can be difficult to efficiently differentiate using existing symbolic or automatic differentiation techniques. Our new algorithm, D*, computes efficient symbolic derivatives for these functions by symbolically executing the expression graph at compile time to eliminate common subexpressions and by exploiting the special nature of the graph that represents the derivative of a function. This graph has a sum of products form; the new algorithm computes a factorization of this derivative graph along with an efficient grouping of product terms into subexpressions. For the problems in our test suite D* generates symbolic derivatives which are up to 4.6 x 103 times faster than those computed by the symbolic math program Mathematica and up to 2.2x105 times faster than the non-symbolic automatic differentiation program CppAD. In some cases the D* derivatives rival the best manually derived solutions.

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                cover image ACM Transactions on Graphics
                ACM Transactions on Graphics  Volume 26, Issue 3
                July 2007
                976 pages
                ISSN:0730-0301
                EISSN:1557-7368
                DOI:10.1145/1276377
                Issue’s Table of Contents

                Copyright © 2007 ACM

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                Association for Computing Machinery

                New York, NY, United States

                Publication History

                • Published: 29 July 2007
                Published in tog Volume 26, Issue 3

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