Adjoint Algorithmic Differentiation for Black-Scholes

Adjoint algorithmic differentiation is particularly interesting in finance as we often encounter the case of a function that takes many input (the market data) and returns one output (the price) and we would like to also compute sensitivities (greeks) to each input.

As I am just starting around it, to get a better grasp, I first tried to apply the idea to the analytic knock out barrier option formula, by hand, only to find out I was making way too many errors by hand to verify anything. So I tried the simpler vanilla Black-Scholes formula. I also made various errors, but managed to fix all of them relatively easily.

I decided to compare how much time it took to compute price, delta, vega, theta, rho, rho2 between single sided finite difference and the adjoint approach. Here are the results for 1 million options:

FD time=2.13s
Adjoint time=0.63s

It works well, but doing it by hand is crazy and too error prone. It might be simpler for Monte-Carlo payoffs however.

There are not many Java tools that can do reverse automatic differentiation, I found some thesis on it, with an interesting byte code oriented approach (one difficulty is that you need to reverse loops, while statements).