Title: Tangent: Automatic Differentiation Using Source Code Transformation in Python,
Abstract: Automatic differentiation (AD) is an essential primitive for machine learning
programming systems. Tangent is a new library that performs AD using source
code transformation (SCT) in Python. It takes numeric functions written in a
syntactic subset of Python and NumPy as input, and generates new Python
functions which calculate a derivative. This approach to automatic
differentiation is different from existing packages popular in machine
learning, such as TensorFlow and Autograd. Advantages are that Tangent
generates gradient code in Python which is readable by the user, easy to
understand and debug, and has no runtime overhead. Tangent also introduces
abstractions for easily injecting logic into the generated gradient code,
further improving usability.