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TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

tensorflow.org

51–60 of 211 posts

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#51
So, i have a very simple question.. :

I want to start deep learning now, to implement RNNs, autoencoders, Q-learning on a very specific application (not images).

I've read a lot of papers, but not done any DL implementations yet (although many classical ML so far), my question is very simple :

Where do I start ????

Should I use Torch ? Theano ? Theano + pylearn2 ? Theano + pylearn + Lasagne ? Caffe ?

Or should I just switch to this magical new library directly ?

I feel confused.. any advice ?

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#52

Any reason you wrote the Python wrapper in SWIG instead of Cython? The nice thing about Cython is that you can wire up two C extensions to talk to each other directly, without going through Python. Cython also gives you 2/3 compatibility out of the box.

SWIG supports many other languages besides Python.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#53
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am really excited about this library. Tensors are the future; matrices are going to look so old in a few years. In fairness, Theano already knew that. I cannot wait to dig into this and am very relieved that Google's best are still using Python for this endeavour...but...using Python 2.7. I have just recently been persuaded by the community that 3.5 is cost free, and here I have this enormous counterexample. For th…

> Tensors are the future; matrices are going to look so old in a few years. I am honestly curious about this point of view. Is there any example where actual multidimensional tensor have any relevance? What I mostly see around is just standard linear algebra operations on matrices and vectors lifted to higher-dimensional tensors point-wise (for instance applying a certain operation to all 2-dimensional subtensors of…

In my domain (finance) correlations between vectors are unstable but (maybe) dependent on cross-sectional relationships in the problem space. Some of the mathematics behind elastic body deformation (car tyres in in mechanical engineering, fluid dynamics in weather forecasting) have high applicability. Tensors are required.

It's true that tensors are hard to reason about - they overclock my brain most of the time - but there is no doubt that, just like moving from scalars to vectors massively increases your real-world modelling power, so does the natural extrapolation to matrices, and from there, tensors.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#54

"TensorFlow is an Open Source Software Library for Machine Intelligence" and then later "TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs." So it seems to be a dataflow computation library that is being used for AI/learning. Since I know almost nothing about either, I'm wondering if this (dataflow) approach has other applications unrelated to deep learning. Any comments?…

FPGAs are not measuring up to GPUs yet for these tasks. There's too much floating-point math (and yes, Altera is addressing this) for forward prediction, and way too much intermediate state to save for training (GPU memory controllers are 'da bomb for this). Finally, OpenCL compilation time on FPGAs is measured in hours as compared to seconds for GPUs.

That said, address all of the above and maybe NVIDIA's stock won't hit 50 next year.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#55
post #37

GPU support, woohoo!

And just 4 years after their insistence that GPUs would never have a role at Google... How 'bout that?

Google is a big place, with diverse opinions. Even better, it encourages updating one's opinion in face of new evidence. GPUs have proven themselves cost-effective in tackling a number of vision problems [and others], Google has those problems, so the opinion was updated and the problems were solved in a cost-effective manner.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#56

So, i have a very simple question.. : I want to start deep learning now, to implement RNNs, autoencoders, Q-learning on a very specific application (not images). I've read a lot of papers, but not done any DL implementations yet (although many classical ML so far), my question is very simple : Where do I start ???? Should I use Torch ? Theano ? Theano + pylearn2 ? Theano + pylearn + Lasagne ? Caffe ? Or should I just…

Methinks embrace the magical library written by engineers and researchers at Google instead of by a random goulash of machine learning grad students with no investment in the outcome other than graduating.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#57
post #8

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library design…

What is Nile?

I can't find it on Google.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#59

I can't wait to try this tonight. I have a fun "messing around" project (I am using GnuGo to generate as much training data as I need for playing Go on a very small board, and I am almost to the point of starting to train and test models). BTW, Ruby has always been my scripting language but because of the wealth of libraries for deep learning I am thinking of switching to Python.

I believe the big facebook and google Go networks were trained on data from professional games. Probably you'd get better performance if you did that as well.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#60
post #40
post #8

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library design…

What about Torch or Theano which allow you to use multiple GPUs and clusters? they also have a wide array of libraries which allows you to extend capabilities (itorch etc.). torch is also very fast, most parts written in C so I don't know if Tensorflow would be really that fast compared to existing librairies. One thing find I found interesting is the ability to use the software you designed in research directly in p…

As far as I can tell, this may not be faster than theano/torch, but it doesn't sound like it'll be slower. It takes a similar approach of sending all the big computation stuff out to efficient implementations. The "slow" language code is simply building up a graph of work to be done by the efficient implementations.
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