-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 31.05.2016 07:17, Mikera wrote: > I've been working with a number of collaborators on a deep > learning library for Clojure. > > Some key features: - An abstract API for key machine learning > functionality - Ability to declare graphs / stacks of operations > (somewhat analogous to tensorflow) - Support for multiple > underlying implementations (ClojureScript, JVM, CPU, GPU) - > Integration with core.matrix for N-dimensional data processing > > We intend to release as open source. We haven't released yet > because we want to get the API right first but it is looking very > promising.
Almost all of the development in deep learning is done in Python, so having to reproduce this work on a different runtime (and language) seems non-Clojure-like for me (compared to being hosted on the JVM and leveraging this ecosystem). deeplearning4j is already attempting it from the Java side with the argument of distributed scaling, but again, there is a ton of work done for the Python toolkits including massive scaling (e.g. with tensorflow) and most research is there, so my question would be what the actual goals for a Clojure stack would be? Machine learning systems usually can be implemented very well as a "microservice" because they have no state (assumed the model is trained and constant) and just need to return an output given a sample (act like a pure function). This has worked out fine for me in Clojure so far. There are many other important machine learning concepts and papers beyond deep learning, which can be used that way. The network IO can be problematic in some cases ofc., e.g. small models+low-latency requirement, but I think the leverage is much higher and will increase unless the ML community switches away from Python to the JVM (highly unlikely atm.). I personally will rather focus on ML papers and improving the algorithm on paper and in Python than reimplementing a ton of work in Clojure just to get on parity in my favourite language. Another point is performance. For many areas it doesn't matter too much whether you are 5 or 10% faster as long as you can scale. In machine learning it is often critical though as these 5-10% are already hours and scaling can be hard model-wise. I have tried to get performance on par with Theano out of Clatrix (both on CPU) a year ago and Theano was 2-4x times faster on my machine. Even if a Clojure stack would address this, there is a lot of work necessary to constantly optimize the stack for different GPU architectures and compute graphs. Theano has atm. 40 contributors or so, not to speak of TensorFlow being backed by Google & DeepMind now. I think a much better approach would be to bring Python native bindings to the JVM. There is http://www.jyni.org/ and they seem to be getting closer to numpy support, but are only two guys atm. (I think). While this is a more low-level effort and has little to do with Clojure, it would allow to use all Python libraries natively from Clojure (together with core.matrix backends for numpy, etc.). Jython is considered as slow as CPython, so one could expect to have Python-like performance with a small wrapper library, because most of the performance critical code is already in the native libraries. From there emancipating with Clojure through a core.matrix based-stack would be a non-uphill battle similar to the development of the Clojure ecosystem. What points would speak against an approach like this? Christian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.22 (GNU/Linux) iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJXTXq+AAoJEICbLivqiPOFR1sQAKZYWzGz3mEFVQuItOUgFz8p /zRh3oj2jLYOT5rHxEehZkZfQEjuRVMn6NW5nPR8c6mEzUc2FRNUTJHbDAgqaWSp LxIOy5qfqzuA1J1x/hlsn1JRGMrvjZv+NvW2PpG8WSgZYwblIxdzzcRCYiRQ4+tQ IhGDg1CKc2awGOJHLuJmzTuHtI+fIhvhDxRBEjvlfTdIInKugS5K0rwyiXr50jcx zoO5jnhibcZB9LxskmW0J/8kH/hT2RD8mwjeI5oQYZuHZ/LvZX0+U9ocihyxoL2B YFd2TwDc7ebgx71gsAnSTPcrIOfIwItprP4ka2gWtmXGJR3PZxfm5JlBir/gJIYf Aa3uqR19qOFCgxwUCqFCWTVgojVFcF4F+VU7dXtfrQE5hkmBycSwbXiDh4CC11jV Lhlff+yjv4OL2IYrPMBbVVU/KeWH+o4ETR0GaePRfGuBOEc04048F4Xz84NBZ6ke lJhGL63JpUKqBJAPjZlU57VMoNMIczHdlMGF1oRhqkWzo0gD4ygX5C8g90xXGXLq NjF/GiFEUWR1xzPvqLTNIX2kTveW46ZBDTiYCYCD8j+8yxGw04ow5wEoflbhz3Gd PdWk7wb9bXlSHm6+b0Ax8CGQqMeDbb/RXqHneTDCQBjDW4olmzWfpRokUGj+K0ne /1dgMs5AjIB+QHMW+PHZ =3hFS -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
