Fast Differentiable Matrix Square Root
Two efficient variants to compute the differentiable matrix square root.
Computing the matrix square root or its inverse in a differentiable manner is important in a variety of computer vision tasks. Previous methods either adopt the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to explicitly factorize the matrix or use the Newton-Schulz iteration (NS iteration) to derive the approximate solution. However, both methods are not computationally efficient enough in either the forward pass or in the backward pass. We propose two more efficient variants to compute the differentiable matrix square root. For the forward propagation, one method is to use Matrix Taylor Polynomial (MTP), and the other method is to use Matrix Padé Approximants (MPA). The backward gradient is computed by iteratively solving the continuous-time Lyapunov equation using the matrix sign function. Both methods yield considerable speed-up compared with the SVD or the Newton-Schulz iteration.