veni

A Python package for deep learning using forward automatic differentiation based on JAX.

Table of contents

• Description
• Dependencies and installation
  • Installing from source
• Documentation
• Examples and Tutorials
• Benchmarks
• Tests
• Authors and contributors
• How to contribute
  • Submitting a patch
• License
• References

Description

veni is a Python package, built on JAX, providing an easy interface to deal with Neural Network using forward automatic differention. Inspired by the very recent (2021) papers of Atılım Günes Baydin et al. and David Silver et al., we have decided to implement a package able to reproduce the results, and give freedom to further investigate this new emerging area of AI.

Dependencies and installation

veni requires requires jax, jaxlib, torch, numpy, sphinx (for the documentation). The code is tested for Python 3, while compatibility of Python 2 is not guaranteed anymore. It can be installed directly from the source code.

Installing from source

The official distribution is on GitHub, and you can clone the repository using

> git clone https://github.com/DSSC-projects/veni

You can also install it using pip via

> python -m pip install git+https://github.com/DSSC-projects/veni

Documentation

veni uses Sphinx for code documentation. You can view the documentation online here. To build the html version of the docs locally simply:

cd docs
make html

The generated html can be found in docs/build/html. Open up the index.html you find there to browse.

Examples and Tutorials

The directory examples contains some examples showing how to use veni. In particular we show how to create simple deep learning architectures, how to train via forward automatic differentiation an architecture, and finally how to sample differently candidate directions.

Benchmarks

The directory benchmarks contains some important benchmarks showing how to reproduce Atılım Günes Baydin et al. results by using the simple veni interface. We further provide logs for efficient analysis of the data. Further benchmark involving directions and optimizers are also available for testing.

Tests

In order to run the tests on the package pytest is needed.

To tests the implementation, run on the main directory the command:

pytest

Authors and contributors

veni is currently developed and mantained by Data Science and Scientific Computing master students:

• Francesco Tomba
• Dario Coscia
• Alessandro Pierro

Contact us by email for further information or questions about veni, or suggest pull requests. Contributions improving either the code or the documentation are welcome!

How to contribute

We'd love to accept your patches and contributions to this project. There are just a few small guidelines you need to follow.

Submitting a patch

1. It's generally best to start by opening a new issue describing the bug or feature you're intending to fix. Even if you think it's relatively minor, it's helpful to know what people are working on. Mention in the initial issue that you are planning to work on that bug or feature so that it can be assigned to you.

2. Follow the normal process of forking the project, and setup a new branch to work in. It's important that each group of changes be done in separate branches in order to ensure that a pull request only includes the commits related to that bug or feature.

3. To ensure properly formatted code, please make sure to use 4 spaces to indent the code. The easy way is to run on your bash the provided script: ./code_formatter.sh. You should also run pylint over your code. It's not strictly necessary that your code be completely "lint-free", but this will help you find common style issues.

4. Do your best to have well-formed commit messages for each change. This provides consistency throughout the project, and ensures that commit messages are able to be formatted properly by various git tools.

5. Finally, push the commits to your fork and submit a pull request. Please, remember to rebase properly in order to maintain a clean, linear git history.

Citations

If you are considering using veni on your reaserch please cite us:

Tomba, F., Coscia, D., & Pierro, A. (2022). veni (Version 0.0.1) [Computer software]. https://github.com/DSSC-projects/veni

You can also download the bibtex format from the citation widget on the sidebar

License

See the LICENSE file for license rights and limitations (MIT).

References

To implement the package we follow these works:

• A. G. Baydin, B. A. Pearlmutter, D. Syme, F. Wood, and P. Torr. _Gradients without back- propagation, 2022
• D. Silver, A. Goyal, I. Danihelka, M. Hessel, and H. van Hasselt. _Learning by directional gradient descent. In International Conference on Learning Representations, 2022
• Bradbury, J., Frostig, R., Hawkins, P., Johnson, M. J., Leary, C., Maclaurin, D., Necula, G., Paszke, A., VanderPlas, J., Wanderman-Milne, S., & Zhang, Q. (2018). JAX: composable transformations of Python+NumPy programs (0.3.13) [Computer software]. http://github.com/google/jax
• Harris, C.R., Millman, K.J., van der Walt, S.J. et al. Array programming with NumPy. Nature 585, 357–362 (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2.
• Adam Paszke, Sam Gross, Francisco Massa, Adam Lerer, James Bradbury, Gregory Chanan, Trevor Killeen, Zeming Lin, Natalia Gimelshein, Luca Antiga, Alban Desmaison, Andreas Kopf, Edward Yang, Zachary DeVito, Martin Raison, Alykhan Tejani, Sasank Chilamkurthy, Benoit Steiner, Lu Fang, Junjie Bai, and Soumith Chintala. Pytorch: An imperative style, high-performance deep learning library. In H. Wallach, H. Larochelle, A. Beygelzimer, F. d'Alch ́e-Buc, E. Fox, and R. Garnett, editors, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 32, pages 8024–8035. Curran Associates, Inc., 2019.