I think there’s a lack of clarity in how the Swift for TensorFlow project and fastai library fit together. In today’s SIG Swift meeting [meeting notes] someone went to the trouble of implementing a learning rate scheduler for S4TF [link]. This’d be useful if one didn’t exist already in fastai. A few meetings ago there was discussion about setting up a S4TF ‘model zoo’ inspired by PyTorch’s. When Jeremy brought up that fastai already had this, the response from several people implied they thought fastai was simply a collection of interesting notebooks presented in the two fastai+S4TF lectures at the end of the Deep Learning Course v3.
I’m noticing there’s a trend to bring everything together into S4TF, or rather to recreate it there. I also notice a lot of people either only referring to fastai in reference to a few notebooks, or being unaware that it’s a deep learning training library.
I also don’t really know what S4TF or MLIR is. MLIR I’m okay with: it may be some sort of differentiable compiler, and I’ll get that in time. But what is S4TF? It looks like there’s confusion in abstraction levels.
We have serious limitations in Python. We have an easy to use and powerful language in Swift, connected to a powerful compiler LLVM and the MLIR project. We also have the world’s best training library in fastai, which’ll probably (if not already) evolve into a general-purpose differentiable computing library.
My understanding is there’re serious gains in combining the two (presumably using TensorFlow as the initial ML framework). That sounds like a great idea. Then why is work being done to reinvent the wheel? Work on the Swift and fastai sides should focus on those domains and on integration.
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This is the forum for S4TF and fastai collaboration. We should figure out how these pieces fit together and what range of abstractions are appropriate to each. That way we save a person from doing serious duplicate work, and keep the community on the same page. It’ll also give a clear sense of progress and what real-world goal we’re moving towards.
The way I envision the deep learning / differentiable stack is Low / Mid / High : MLIR / Swift / fastai. Each part of it has an important role.
@jeremy and @clattner, I think this is relevant to you; and anyone involved on either side of harebrain.