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Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit
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01/22/2017
The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit (CNTK) is an open-source Machine learning toolkit for commercial-grade distributed deep learning. It describes neural networks as a series of computational steps via a directed graph. CNTK allows the user to easily realize and combine popular machine learning model types such as feed-forward DNNs (DNNs), convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs/LSTMs). CNTK implements stochastic gradient descent (SGD, error backpropagation) learning with automatic differentiation and parallelization across multiple GPUs and servers.
This video below provides a high-level overview of the toolkit. In addition, Microsoft offers an introductory course to deep learning with CNTK, Deep Learning Explained: https://www.edx.org/course/deep-learning-explained
As of 1/22/2017, the latest release of CNTK is 2.5.1.
CNTK can be included as a library in your Python, C#, or C++ programs, or used as a standalone machine-learning tool through its own model description language (BrainScript). In addition you can use the CNTK model evaluation functionality from your Java programs.
CNTK supports 64-bit Linux or 64-bit Windows operating systems. To install you can either choose pre-compiled binary packages, or compile the toolkit from the source provided in GitHub.
CNTK is also one of the first deep-learning toolkits to support the Open Neural Network Exchange ONNX format, an open-source shared model representation for framework interoperability and shared optimization. Co-developed by Microsoft and supported by many others, ONNX allows developers to move models between frameworks such as CNTK, Caffe2, MXNet, and PyTorch