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TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

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Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#92
post #85
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, we all start out that way. But by the 3rd or 4th year, you frequently just want to write that thesis and get on to the next thing because you've already advanced the field as much as you're going to as a grad student. I have a large package of code on sourceforge that consists of my grad school and postdoctoral efforts. If I compare its style to what 2 decades in the industry since has taught me, it's laughable…

Nobody forced us to open-source Lasagne, so I think that remark was a bit unfair. If we really didn't care about anything but graduating, why would we bother going through the trouble of sharing the code in the first place? But I do see your point. Google obviously has a lot more manpower to spend on this, so it might be a better bet in the long run. It's also worth comparing this to a few similar projects that have…

Actually lasagne is pretty good, I wasn't targeting you (but then you're pretty good at winning kaggle competitions so perhaps there's a connection there, no?)...

I'm thinking mostly of Theano, which, from a performance standpoint, appears to have died the death of a thousand inexperienced cooks in the kitchen. The ~1000x performance regressions that it invokes when a junior data scientist goes off the rails and ends up with a python inner loop amidst GPU kernels is just depressing and seemingly unfixable. Hopefully, TensorFlow will be better if only because it was written in a world now very aware of Pixel's Law.

Mxnet is awesome, but perhaps a little too parameter servery for my personal tastes, and I'm now wondering what the point of CGT is now other than to be Coke to Google's Pepsi. I also think the whole deep learning framework business model just took a torpedo amidships (and not long after the layoffs at Ersatz).

Finally, I had never heard of Chainer until today, thanks! That said, without autograd functionality, the people I work with would probably stick with Caffe + cuDNN.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#93
post #76

I tried going through the site and also the comments but couldn't wrap my head around what this library actually is. It sounds awesome based on the response/comments. Can anyone explain this to a layman?

If you want to train neural nets, you can either rewrite everything from scratch and get a bug-ridden sub-optimal implementation, or you can use a kind of off-the-shelf library.

The problem is that there are about 3-5 alternatives out there, and none of them are mature enough or convincing enough to dominate. The field changes so fast that it's easy for them to become obsolete.

What you're seeing here is the enthusiasm of people who really want to get a good tool with proper support, and be able to stick with it. I'm still not sure if TensorFlow is that tool, but it depends on what will happen to it during the coming years.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#94
Seems like Ben Lorica's call for open source tensor libraries for data science [1], were answered!

[1.a] http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/03/lets-build-open-source-tens... (March 2015)

[1.b] http://radar.oreilly.com/2015/05/the-tensor-renaissance-in-d... (May 2015)

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#95
post #49
post #2

> The TensorFlow Python API requires Python 2.7 The whole scientific Python stack is available for Python 3. This seems like a somewhat backwards thing to do -- or perhaps the requirement is intended to mean at least 2.7? Edit: added context Edited again: More careful wording

It has a C++ API, so there is no lock-in to Python, either 2.7 or 3.x.

It looks like the C++ API is for executing graphs only, which is kind of odd.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#96
post #91
post #79

Does it support OpenCL and thus Intel integrated and discrete AMD GPUs?

Appears to be only CUDA from the code. Also no distributed systems support released. Also, I cannot get it to work since this morning.

Requires nvidia capability >=3.5 at that (GK11x and Maxwell) which rules out anything I've currently got (a couple of 760's/GK104's)... which is the chip Amazon EC2 uses as well.

They're probably using Dynamic Parallelism.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#97
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're looking to support Python 3 -- there are a few changes we are aware of that are required, and we welcome contributions to help! Tracking here: https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/1

Thanks for a constructive reply to a (well-meaning, but) not very nice comment! Congrats on the library, which looks awesome.

Criticism is considered "not very nice"? Your initial comment wasn't impolite or anything.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#98
post #6

> This open source release supports single machines and mobile devices. Can someone clarify if "single machines" means the Apache license only applies to single machines and not distributed systems? Sidenote: I wish every open source project had a release video.

Is it common for code to open sourced, but only for use on single machines?

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#99
post #83
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "backwards" meme doesn't make any sense. Python 2 and Python 3 are different languages that happen to share the same name, a lot of syntax, and near-source compatibility, but they've been developed concurrently for ten years now. It's kind of like C and C++. If the current Python 2 team (which is part of the Python Software Foundation) abandons it, probably somebody else will take over maintenance, because it se…

Python 2 is dead.

hmmm. Google does not seem to agree. Your assertion is a wish not a fact. Dogmatic 3.x people are being shown, yet again, the uncomfortable, brutal truth, that 3.x is not happening in science.

Seriously. If you're advising someone considering Python on the 2 v 3 question today, how can you not tell them that possibly one of the most important new machine learning libraries, only works on 2.7.

Re: TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence

#100

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…

Right now Keras is your best bet for most deep learning tasks, and Caffe is best for image processing (i.e. convolutional neural networks). Keep an eye on tensorflow though because it may come to be the gold standard over the next several months to year.

Edit: Btw, François Chollet, the author of keras, made the following tweet this morning: "For those wondering about Keras and TensorFlow: I hope to start working on porting Keras to TensorFlow soon (Theano support will continue)."

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