I have studied tensorflow for about one month. I just feel that creating a network with primitive operations of Tensorflow is very verbose. Then I found some high level API, such as TF-Slim, TF Learn, Keras. But multiple choices confuse me so that I don't know which I should learn.
TF-Slim is a lightweight library for defining, training and evaluating complex models in TensorFlow, but as I investigated, it's only for convnets. What networks Keras can build are more diverse.
Can Anyone give a comparision between them so that I could choose which high level API I should learn ? In terms of :
1. popularity: which ones are the most popular ?
2. practicality: what kinds of network can they build ?
3. performance: what's their training/inference performance ?
... something else
Hope someone could give me a suggestion. Thanks.
I suggest you start with Keras.
It´s very easy to learn, it has a broad user base (see Shobhits link), there is a ton of reference code out there on GitHub and in tutorials / MOOCs / eBooks etc. and you can build almost anything with it. And I personally think that is has a good documentation (although some might disagree with that...).
Since it´s an API that connects to Tensorflow, Theano, CNTK (and possibly more frameworks in the future) you have even more flexibility.
Don´t worry too much about performance. That´s really not important while youre learning.
Related
Knowing that Tensorflow is good for working with matrices, would I be able to use Tensorflow to create a cellular automata? And would this offer a great deal of speed over just coding it in Python?
Are there any tutorials or websites that could point me in the right direction to use Tensorflow for more general purpose computing than machine learning (for example, simulations)?
If so, could someone help point me in the right direction to the type of Tensorflow commands I would need to learn to make this program? Thanks!
A TensorFlow implementation is likely to offer an improvement in execution time, especially if executed by GPU, since CA can be executed in parallel. See: https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/320/67726.
A starting point for TensorFlow in general might be the official guide and documentation, which do go beyond just machine learning. Also available are two tutorials on non-ML examples: Mandelbrot Set, Partial Differential Equations.
While TensorFlow is usually mentioned in the context of machine learning, it is worth noting that:
TensorFlow™ is an open source software library for high performance
numerical computation. Its flexible architecture allows easy
deployment of computation across a variety of platforms (CPUs, GPUs,
TPUs), and from desktops to clusters of servers to mobile and edge
devices.
Edit: here's an implementation and a tutorial about Conway's Game of Life using TF.
Suppose that I have want to make a model that does something. Now when I search about the topic in Google or YouTube, I find many related tutorials and it seems like some clever programmer had already implemented that model with Deep learning.
But how do they know that what type of layers, what type of activation functions, loss functions, optimizer, number of units etc. they need to solve that certain problem using deep learning.
Are there any techniques for knowing this, or its just a matter of understanding and experience? Also it would be very helpful if somebody could point me to some videos or articles answering my question.
This is more of a matter of understanding and experience. When building a model from scratch, you must understand which optimizer, loss, etc. makes sense for your particular problem. In order to choose these appropriately, you must understand the differences between the available optimizers, loss functions, etc.
In regards to choosing how many layers and nodes, what batch size, what learning rate, etc.-- these are all hyperparameters that you will need to test and tune as you experiment with your model.
I have a Deep Learning Fundamentals YouTube playlist that you may find helpful. It covers the fundamental basics of each of these topics in short videos. Additionally, this Deep Learning with Keras playlist may also be beneficial if you're wanting to focus more on coding after getting the basic concepts down.
Thanks for the question.
The CS231n Stanford lectures on CNN is the best for beginners refer to the video lectures here and class notes are available here
After watching the lectures and completing the assignments, you will get a basic idea of what Deep Learning is and all the algorithms available etc.
But when it comes to solving real-world problems this won't be sufficient So take this course by Jeremy Howard where he teaches more on how to approach a problem using Kaggle platform.
Keep on solving more problems experimenting new models and algorithms using several platforms like hackerearth, Kaggle, topcoder etc.
I am new to both TensorFlow and also Document Similarity / Topic Modeling therefore I apologize if my questions don't make complete sense.
From my limited understanding, topic modelling is done using algorithms such as LSA,LDA,etc. I have seen code using gensim and LSA but the time to train is very high for the large set of documents I have in mind. Consequently the CPU and RAM resources are very heavy.
Tensorflow doesn't seem to have a native LSA or LDA implementation.
I would appreciate an opinion on :
Would LDA implemented using Tensorflow have a better performance than implemented using gensim?
Could someone tell me of other Tensorflow primitives that I should look at for document similarity rather than LDA?
Once again I am sorry if my questions are too vague and do not cover sufficient information to give a proper response. I am new to this domain and I would appreciate any directions someone could point me to.
Thank you for your time.
Regards,
Jeetu
I am newbie in Tensorflow
Actually, I am testing some example in Tensorflow web-site, and I start to understand some features of the framwork, but what I don't understand is how I can design my architecture, I mean number of layers, type of Layer "conv, pool...", and if it is necessery to do that, because there are many predifined architectures like AmexNet,
Thanks,
I would strongly recommend working through their hands on tutorial, depending on if you have previous ML experience (https://www.tensorflow.org/get_started/mnist/pros) or not (https://www.tensorflow.org/get_started/mnist/beginners). The questions you are asking are answered in there.
The question on using predefined architectures or self defined depends on your use case. If you want to do something easy like classifying if there is only a car in the scene or not a more shallow architecture might work better, because it is faster and a more deep one is overkill. However most architectures are similar to the ones already defined in literature.
Another question that arises naturally, while talking about pre defined architecture is about transfer learning / fine tuning. Often pre defined architectures are already learned on some big dataset (mostly ImageNet) and already perform really well out of the box for many tasks. With little training data it makes a lot of sense to use this. With lots of training data it can hinder your progress though.
I want to study on the research of deep learning, but I don't know which framwork should I choice between TensorFlow and PaddlePaddle. who can make a contrast between the two frameworks? which one is better? especially in the running efficiency of CPU
It really depends what you are shooting for...
If you plan on training, CPU is not going to work well for you. Use colab or kaggle.
Assuming you do get a GPU, it depends if you want to focus on classification or object detection.
If you focus on classification, Keras is probably the easiest to work with or pytorch if you want some advanced stuff and to be able to change things.
If you plan on object detection, things are getting complicated... Inference is reasonably easy but training is complicated. There are actually 4 platforms you should consider:
Tensorflow - powerful but very difficult to work with. If you do not use Keras (and for OD you usually can't), you need to preprocess the dataset into tfrecords and it is a pain. The OD Api has very cryptic messages and it is very sensitive to the combination of tf version and api version. On the other hand, cool models like efficientdet are more or less easy to use.
MMdetection - very powerful framework, has lots of advanced models and once you understand how to work with it, you can easily work with and of the models it supports. Downside is that some models are slow to arrive (efficientdet, for example)
paddlepaddle - if you know Chinese, this should work ok, maybe. The documentation is a bit behind and usually requires lots of improvisation. Basically it is similar to mmdetection just with a few unique models and a few missing models.
detectron2 - I didn't work with this one, but it seems to support only a few models.
You probably need first to define for yourself what do you want to do and then choose.
Good luck!
It is not that trivial. Some models run faster with one kind of framework others with another. Furthermore, it depends on the hardware as well. See this blog. If inference is your only concern, then you can develop your model in any of the popular frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, etc. In the end convert your model to ONNX format and benchmark its performance with DNN-Bench to choose the best inference engine for your application.