MyCaffe: A Complete C# Re-Write of Caffe with Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

MyCaffe is an open-source, fully C# re-implementation of the Caffe deep learning framework, enhanced with reinforcement learning capabilities and optimized for Windows .NET developers to leverage GPU acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a complete C# rewrite of Caffe with added reinforcement learning support, enabling Windows developers to utilize deep learning with improved integration and performance.

Findings

Supports GPU acceleration via NVIDIA CUDA

Provides reinforcement learning modules

Achieves high performance on Windows .NET

Abstract

Over the past few years Caffe, from Berkeley AI Research, has gained a strong following in the deep learning community with over 15K forks on the github.com/BLVC/Caffe site. With its well organized, very modular C++ design it is easy to work with and very fast. However, in the world of Windows development, C# has helped accelerate development with many of the enhancements that it offers over C++, such as garbage collection, a very rich .NET programming framework and easy database access via Entity Frameworks. So how can a C# developer use the advances of C# to take full advantage of the benefits offered by the Berkeley Caffe deep learning system? The answer is the fully open source, 'MyCaffe' for Windows .NET programmers. MyCaffe is an open source, complete C# language re-write of Berkeley's Caffe. This article describes the general architecture of MyCaffe including the newly added MyCaffeTrainerRL for Reinforcement Learning. In addition, this article discusses how MyCaffe closely follows the C++ Caffe, while talking efficiently to the low level NVIDIA CUDA hardware to offer a high performance, highly programmable deep learning system for Windows .NET programmers.