Papers › The Elements of Differentiable Programming
The Elements of Differentiable Programming
Mathieu Blondel, Vincent Roulet
Artificial intelligence has recently experienced remarkable advances, fueled by large models, vast datasets, accelerated hardware, and, last but not least, the transformative power of differentiable programming. This new programming paradigm enables end-to-end differentiation of complex computer programs (including those with control flows and data structures), making gradient-based optimization of program parameters possible. As an emerging paradigm, differentiable programming builds upon several areas of computer science and applied mathematics, including automatic differentiation, graphical models, optimization and statistics. This book presents a comprehensive review of the fundamental concepts useful for differentiable programming. We adopt two main perspectives, that of optimization and that of probability, with clear analogies between the two. Differentiable programming is not merely the differentiation of programs, but also the thoughtful design of programs intended for differentiation. By making programs differentiable, we inherently introduce probability distributions over their execution, providing a means to quantify the uncertainty associated with program outputs.
In Syntology View this paper on Syntology: its repositories, every harvested function with whether it ran, its licence and the call to fetch it.
Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.
For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2403.14606")
Code
Syntology Ran 22 of 23 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 1 has no recorded run. Of those that ran: 22 ran with no contract checked.
By repository: official repository: 23 samples from 1 repository, 22 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
23 samples harvested; 22 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 1 has no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-25; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.
Licence: 0 of the 23 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.
Harvested from diffprog/code. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.
Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.
Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.
587d28cddf001d22 · report
802c2203920ee74b · report
f2d5d8a5fd1be3c9 · report
7aa9a0e7f0c35c60 · report
46817697c062b78f · report
ac4084b445f0372b · report
13c7a0f0304259eb · report
7a10f8d6f8e878d2 · report
b14f8c6c86585a4e · report
d2f49ba064bce628 · report
fbed1f8b664b20d4 · report
b8aba2e639831d0e · report
bbda47f128c79ae1 · report
a9bb014b256b8027 · report
81dda7d4de68eb97 · report
2399ee8f6e7c8a6d · report
efeea7d6cead0548 · report
8e99ad829bc70d6d · report
0cf69f025a2232ed · report
1af82a1fc3f8bb07 · report
91f293d92f3b9828 · report
8bb9ef7b2dd1407c · report
252ab259ff2634ab · report
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections