Flux is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

machine-learning

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

library and ecosystem written in

Julia Julia is usually a feminine given name. It is a Latinate feminine form of the name Julio and Julius. (For further details on etymology, see the Wiktionary entry "Julius".) The given name ''Julia'' had been in use throughout Late Antiquity (e.g. ...

. Its current stable release is v. 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. Flux's focus on interoperability has enabled, for example, support for Neural Differential Equations, by fusing Flux.jl and DifferentialEquations.jl into DiffEqFlux.jl. Flux supports recurrent and convolutional networks. It is also capable of

differentiable programming Differentiable programming is a programming paradigm in which a numeric computer program can be differentiated throughout via automatic differentiation. This allows for gradient-based optimization of parameters in the program, often via gradie ...

through its source-to-source

automatic differentiation In mathematics and computer algebra, automatic differentiation (AD), also called algorithmic differentiation, computational differentiation, auto-differentiation, or simply autodiff, is a set of techniques to evaluate the derivative of a function ...

package, Zygote.jl. Julia is a popular language in machine-learning and Flux.jl is its most highly regarded machine-learning repository. A demonstration compiling Julia code to run in Google's

tensor processing unit Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) is an AI accelerator application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) developed by Google for Artificial neural network, neural network machine learning, using Google's own TensorFlow software. Google began using TPUs ...

(TPU) received praise from

Google Brain Google Brain is a deep learning artificial intelligence research team under the umbrella of Google AI, a research division at Google dedicated to artificial intelligence. Formed in 2011, Google Brain combines open-ended machine learning research w ...

AI lead

Jeff Dean Jeffrey Adgate "Jeff" Dean (born July 23, 1968) is an American computer scientist and software engineer. Since 2018, he is the lead of Google AI, Google's AI division. Education Dean received a B.S., ''summa cum laude'', from the University o ...

. Flux has been used as a framework to build neural networks that work with homomorphic encrypted data without ever decrypting it. This kind of application is envisioned to be central for privacy to future

API An application programming interface (API) is a way for two or more computer programs to communicate with each other. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standa ...

using machine-learning models. Flux.jl is an

intermediate representation An intermediate representation (IR) is the data structure or code used internally by a compiler or virtual machine to represent source code. An IR is designed to be conducive to further processing, such as optimization and translation. A "good" ...

for running high level programs on

CUDA CUDA (or Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for general purpose processing, an approach ca ...

hardware. It was the predecessor to CUDAnative.jl which is also a GPU programming language.

References

{{Differentiable computing Machine learning Free software programmed in Julia Software using the MIT license

See also

References