Akid: A Library for Neural Network Research and Production from a Dataism Approach

TL;DR

Akid is a neural network library that bridges research and production by providing high-level abstractions, seamless deployment, and a data-centric approach inspired by natural processing entities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel dataism-inspired abstraction layer for neural networks, enabling flexible research and seamless production deployment in distributed environments.

Findings

Supports distributed training and deployment

Provides high-level abstractions for research and production

Enables separation of development and operations environments

Abstract

Neural networks are a revolutionary but immature technique that is fast evolving and heavily relies on data. To benefit from the newest development and newly available data, we want the gap between research and production as small as possibly. On the other hand, differing from traditional machine learning models, neural network is not just yet another statistic model, but a model for the natural processing engine --- the brain. In this work, we describe a neural network library named {\texttt akid}. It provides higher level of abstraction for entities (abstracted as blocks) in nature upon the abstraction done on signals (abstracted as tensors) by Tensorflow, characterizing the dataism observation that all entities in nature processes input and emit out in some ways. It includes a full stack of software that provides abstraction to let researchers focus on research instead of implementation, while at the same time the developed program can also be put into production seamlessly in a distributed environment, and be production ready. At the top application stack, it provides out-of-box tools for neural network applications. Lower down, akid provides a programming paradigm that lets user easily build customized models. The distributed computing stack handles the concurrency and communication, thus letting models be trained or deployed to a single GPU, multiple GPUs, or a distributed environment without affecting how a model is specified in the programming paradigm stack. Lastly, the distributed deployment stack handles how the distributed computing is deployed, thus decoupling the research prototype environment with the actual production environment, and is able to dynamically allocate computing resources, so development (Devs) and operations (Ops) could be separated. Please refer to http://akid.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ for documentation.