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The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

thegradient.pub

21–30 of 201 posts

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#21
post #11

Why?

100% anecdotal -- The Keras interface for tensorflow makes it easy & fast to make "good enough" models. That is often a driving factor

I've personally found pytorch easier to use than Keras. It's undoubtably easier to use than Tensorflow, of course.

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#24
We really enjoyed editing this piece. Just wanted to doubly highlight a few of Horace's (chillee on HN) resources linked at the bottom:

Code: https://github.com/Chillee/pytorch-vs-tensorflow

Ablation of claims: https://thegradient.pub/p/cef6dd26-f952-4265-a2bc-f8bfb9eb1e...

JS interactive charts: https://chillee.github.io/pytorch-vs-tensorflow/

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#25
post #9

I think tensorflow dominates industry purely because of its capability of exporting the model into a coreml Android model or easy of moving it to production in a GCP environment or in whatever form. Pytorch might have to build a good production pipeline around it to catch up in this game. With fastai module that's built on Pytorch learning and developing Deep Learning solutions have become a lot easier. So there's a…

And simply TensorFlow was there earlier, so people implemented stuff in it. I think there's more inertia in industry, whereas researchers may more easily switch frameworks between two papers.

And Keras was there too which made a lot of people us Keras with TF. I doubt if TF would have risen to this popularity hadn't it been to Keras.

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#26
post #9

I think tensorflow dominates industry purely because of its capability of exporting the model into a coreml Android model or easy of moving it to production in a GCP environment or in whatever form. Pytorch might have to build a good production pipeline around it to catch up in this game. With fastai module that's built on Pytorch learning and developing Deep Learning solutions have become a lot easier. So there's a…

You can do the same with PyTorch, right? Just export the model as .onnx and import it with whatever inference engine you like.

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#27

It's only a matter of time until PyTorch will also dominate industry. It's always like this. Think how Ubuntu took over the server market because amateurs were preferring it instead of Redhat/CentOS. And when they became professionals or were in a position to decide, they also put Ubuntu on the server because this is what they knew best.

I'm not sure that's a great example, given that AWS mostly runs on RHEL-based OSs and Debian is still preferred for Docker. Ubuntu did not "take over the server market".

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#28

It's only a matter of time until PyTorch will also dominate industry. It's always like this. Think how Ubuntu took over the server market because amateurs were preferring it instead of Redhat/CentOS. And when they became professionals or were in a position to decide, they also put Ubuntu on the server because this is what they knew best.

When did Ubuntu take over the server market?

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#29
I remember using early Torch (in Lua! As someone who knew only Matlab!) in 2015-ish; and then using Keras (which is supposed to be an abstraction layer over NN frameworks) and finding it much more verbose and complicated to use without recurring to code snippets.

Perhaps it’s the nature of the game that changed with many new kinds of architectures and so on. But maybe Keras is already overengineered for someone who just wants to make thumbnail sized GAN stuff at home.

Re: The State of Machine Learning Frameworks

#30
post #6
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you could read the article :^) As a summary, though: PyTorch has become dominant in research because of its API (both its stability + having eager mode). TF has become dominant in industry because A. it came out several years before PyTorch and industry is slow to move, B. It supported a lot of production use cases (mobile, serving, removing Python overhead) that PyTorch didn't for a long time.

well, for one pytorch added the python overhead over an otherwise very clean lua jit

PyTorch wraps THNN, not Torch. Moreover, even if this was true, it wouldn't matter at all. Practically 0% of the overhead is related to Python in the first place, all of the time is dominated by the underlying C implementation.
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