Benevolent dictator for life (BDFL) is a title given to a small number of open-source software development leaders, typically project founders who retain the final say in disputes or arguments within the community. The phrase originated in 1995 with reference to Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language.
scikit-learn is a free and open-source machine learning library for the Python programming language. It features various classification, regression and clustering algorithms including support-vector machines, random forests, gradient boosting, k-means and DBSCAN, and is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy. Scikit-learn is a NumFOCUS fiscally sponsored project.
Torch is an open-source machine learning library, a scientific computing framework, and a scripting language based on Lua. It provides LuaJIT interfaces to deep learning algorithms implemented in C. It was created by the Idiap Research Institute at EPFL. Torch development moved in 2017 to PyTorch, a port of the library to Python.
Eclipse Deeplearning4j is a programming library written in Java for the Java virtual machine (JVM). It is a framework with wide support for deep learning algorithms. Deeplearning4j includes implementations of the restricted Boltzmann machine, deep belief net, deep autoencoder, stacked denoising autoencoder and recursive neural tensor network, word2vec, doc2vec, and GloVe. These algorithms all include distributed parallel versions that integrate with Apache Hadoop and Spark.
TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence. It can be used across a range of tasks, but is primarily used for training and inference of neural networks. It is one of the most popular deep learning frameworks, alongside others such as PyTorch and PaddlePaddle.
The following tables compare notable software frameworks, libraries, and computer programs for deep learning applications.
Keras is an open-source library that provides a Python interface for artificial neural networks. Keras was first independent software, then integrated into the TensorFlow library, and later supporting more. "Keras 3 is a full rewrite of Keras [and can be used] as a low-level cross-framework language to develop custom components such as layers, models, or metrics that can be used in native workflows in JAX, TensorFlow, or PyTorch — with one codebase." Keras 3 will be the default Keras version for TensorFlow 2.16 onwards, but Keras 2 can still be used.
spaCy is an open-source software library for advanced natural language processing, written in the programming languages Python and Cython. The library is published under the MIT license and its main developers are Matthew Honnibal and Ines Montani, the founders of the software company Explosion.
Caffe is a deep learning framework, originally developed at University of California, Berkeley. It is open source, under a BSD license. It is written in C++, with a Python interface.
PyTorch is a machine learning library based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is one of the most popular deep learning frameworks, alongside others such as TensorFlow and PaddlePaddle, offering free and open-source software released under the modified BSD license. Although the Python interface is more polished and the primary focus of development, PyTorch also has a C++ interface.
The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) [] is an open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem of technology companies and research organizations that establish open standards for representing machine learning algorithms and software tools to promote innovation and collaboration in the AI sector. ONNX is available on GitHub.
ROCm is an Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) software stack for graphics processing unit (GPU) programming. ROCm spans several domains: general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU), high performance computing (HPC), heterogeneous computing. It offers several programming models: HIP, OpenMP, and OpenCL.
SqueezeNet is a deep neural network for image classification released in 2016. SqueezeNet was developed by researchers at DeepScale, University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford University. In designing SqueezeNet, the authors' goal was to create a smaller neural network with fewer parameters while achieving competitive accuracy. Their best-performing model achieved the same accuracy as AlexNet on ImageNet classification, but has a size 510x less than it.
Flux is an open-source machine-learning software library and ecosystem written in Julia. Its current stable release is v0.14.5 . It has a layer-stacking-based interface for simpler models, and has a strong support on interoperability with other Julia packages instead of a monolithic design. For example, GPU support is implemented transparently by CuArrays.jl. This is in contrast to some other machine learning frameworks which are implemented in other languages with Julia bindings, such as TensorFlow.jl, and thus are more limited by the functionality present in the underlying implementation, which is often in C or C++. Flux joined NumFOCUS as an affiliated project in December of 2021.
Kubeflow is an open-source platform for machine learning and MLOps on Kubernetes introduced by Google. The different stages in a typical machine learning lifecycle are represented with different software components in Kubeflow, including model development (Kubeflow Notebooks), model training (Kubeflow Pipelines,Kubeflow Training Operator), model serving (KServe), and automated machine learning (Katib).
fast.ai is a non-profit research group focused on deep learning and artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2016 by Jeremy Howard and Rachel Thomas with the goal of democratizing deep learning. They do this by providing a massive open online course (MOOC) named "Practical Deep Learning for Coders," which has no other prerequisites except for knowledge of the programming language Python.
DeepSpeed is an open source deep learning optimization library for PyTorch.
NNI is a free and open-source AutoML toolkit developed by Microsoft. It is used to automate feature engineering, model compression, neural architecture search, and hyper-parameter tuning.
CatBoost is an open-source software library developed by Yandex. It provides a gradient boosting framework which among other features attempts to solve for categorical features using a permutation driven alternative compared to the classical algorithm. It works on Linux, Windows, macOS, and is available in Python, R, and models built using CatBoost can be used for predictions in C++, Java, C#, Rust, Core ML, ONNX, and PMML. The source code is licensed under Apache License and available on GitHub.
Owl Scientific Computing is a software system for scientific and engineering computing developed in the Department of Computer Science and Technology, University of Cambridge. The System Research Group (SRG) in the department recognises Owl as one of the representative systems developed in SRG in the 2010s. The source code is licensed under the MIT License and can be accessed from the GitHub repository.
