Flux.jl VS jax

If you are really committed to running on Apple hardware then take a look at Tensorflow for macOS. Another option is the Julia programming language which has very basic Metal support at a CUDA-like level. FluxML would be the ML framework in Julia. I’m not sure either option will be painless or let you do everything you could do with a Nvidia GPU.

Flux dominance!

I’m no compiler expert but check out flux and zygote https://fluxml.ai/ https://fluxml.ai/

I would suggest you to look into Julia ecosystem instead of C++. Julia is almost identical to Python in terms of how you use it but it's still very fast. You should look into flux.jl package for Julia.

Give Julia a try: https://fluxml.ai

2) Flux treats softmax a little different than most other activation functions (see here for more details) such as relu and sigmoid. When you pass an activation function into a layer like Dense(3, 32, relu), Flux expects that the function is broadcast over the layer's output. However, softmax cannot be broadcast as it operates over vectors rather than scalars. This means that if you want to use softmax as the final activation in your model, you need to pass it into Chain() like so:

Can you point to a concrete example of one that someone would run into when using the differential equation solvers with the default and recommended Enzyme AD for vector-Jacobian products? I'd be happy to look into it, but there do not currently seem to be any correctness issues in the Enzyme issue tracker that are current (3 issues are open but they all seem to be fixed, other than https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme.jl/issues/278 which is actually an activity analysis bug in LLVM). So please be more specific. The issue with Enzyme right now seems to moreso be about finding functional forms that compile, and it throws compile-time errors in the event that it cannot fully analyze the program and if it has too much dynamic behavior (example: https://github.com/EnzymeAD/Enzyme.jl/issues/368).

Additional note, we recently did a overhaul of SciMLSensitivity (https://sensitivity.sciml.ai/dev/) and setup a system which amounts to 15 hours of direct unit tests doing a combinatoric check of arguments with 4 hours of downstream testing (https://github.com/SciML/SciMLSensitivity.jl/actions/runs/25...). What that identified is that any remaining issues that can arise are due to the implicit parameters mechanism in Zygote (Zygote.params). To counteract this upstream issue, we (a) try to default to never default to Zygote VJPs whenever we can avoid it (hence defaulting to Enzyme and ReverseDiff first as previously mentioned), and (b) put in a mechanism for early error throwing if Zygote hits any not implemented derivative case with an explicit error message (https://github.com/SciML/SciMLSensitivity.jl/blob/v7.0.1/src...). We have alerted the devs of the machine learning libraries, and from this there has been a lot of movement. In particular, a globals-free machine learning library, Lux.jl, was created with fully explicit parameters https://lux.csail.mit.edu/dev/, and thus by design it cannot have this issue. In addition, the Flux.jl library itself is looking to do a redesign that eliminates implicit parameters (https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/issues/1986). Which design will be the one in the end, that's uncertain right now, but it's clear that no matter what the future designs of the deep learning libraries will fully cut out that part of Zygote.jl. And additionally, the other AD libraries (Enzyme and Diffractor for example) do not have this "feature", so it's an issue that can only arise from a specific (not recommended) way of using Zygote (which now throws explicit error messages early and often if used anywhere near SciML because I don't tolerate it).

So from this, SciML should be rather safe and if not, please share some details and I'd be happy to dig in.

> In his item #1, he links to https://discourse.julialang.org/t/loaderror-when-using-inter... The issue is actually a Zygote bug, a Julia package for auto-differentiation, and is not directly related to Julia codebase (or Flux package) itself. Furthermore, the problematic code is working fine now, because DiffEqFlux has switched to Enzyme, which doesn't have that bug. He should first confirm whether the problem he is citing is actually a problem or not.

> Item #2, again another Zygote bug.

If flux chose a buggy package as a dependency, that's on them, and users are well justified in steering clear of Flux if it has buggy dependencies. As of today, the Project.toml for both Flux and DiffEqFlux still lists Zygote as a dependency. Neither list Enzyme.

https://github.com/FluxML/Flux.jl/blob/master/Project.toml

The dual numbers exist just as surely as the real numbers and have been used well over 100 years

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_number

Pytorch has had them for many years.

https://pytorch.org/docs/stable/generated/torch.autograd.for...

JAX implements them and uses them exactly as stated in this thread.

https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/10157#discussionco...

As you so eloquently stated, "you shouldn't be proclaiming things you don't actually know on a public forum," and doubly so when your claimed "corrections" are so demonstrably and totally incorrect.

On your last point, as long as you jit the topmost level, it doesn't matter whether or not you have inner jitted functions. The end result should be the same.

Source: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/5199#discussioncom...

The design of MLX is inspired by frameworks like NumPy, PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire.

I'm still not totally sure what the issue is. Jax uses program transformations to compile programs to run on a variety of hardware, for example, using XLA for TPUs. It can also run cuda ops for Nvidia gpus without issue: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation.html

There is also support for custom cpp and cuda ops if that's what is needed: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Custom_Operation_for_GP...

I haven't worked with float4, but can imagine that new numerical types would require some special handling. But I assume that's the case for any ml environment.

But really you probably mean fixed point 4bit integer types? Looks like that has had at least some work done in Jax: https://github.com/google/jax/issues/8566

>

Are they even comparing apples to apples to claim that they see these improvements over NumPy?

> While the code complexity and length are roughly the same, the MatX version shows a 2100x over the Numpy version, and over 4x faster than the CuPy version on the same GPU.

NumPy doesn't use GPU by default unless you use something like Jax [1] to compile NumPy code to run on GPUs. I think more honest comparison will mainly compare MatX running on same CPU like NumPy as focus the GPU comparison against CuPy.

[1] https://github.com/google/jax

Actually that never changed. The README has always had an example of differentiating through native Python control flow:

https://github.com/google/jax/commit/948a8db0adf233f333f3e5f...

The constraints on control flow expressions come from jax.jit (because Python control flow can't be staged out) and jax.vmap (because we can't take multiple branches of Python control flow, which we might need to do for different batch elements). But autodiff of Python-native control flow works fine!

For a similar "benchmark" (also Mandelbrot) but took place in Jax repo discussion: https://github.com/google/jax/discussions/11078#discussionco...

2. https://github.com/fantasyland/fantasy-land (A bit heavy on jargon)

Note there is a python version of Ramda available on pypi and there’s a lot of FP tidbits inside JAX:

3. https://pypi.org/project/ramda/ (Worth making your own version if you want to learn, though)

4. For nested data, JAX tree_util is epic: https://jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/jax.tree_util.html and also their curry implementation is funny: https://github.com/google/jax/blob/4ac2bdc2b1d71ec0010412a32...

Anyway don’t put FP on a pedestal, main thing is to focus on the core principles of avoiding external mutation and making helper functions. Doesn’t always work because some languages like Rust don’t have legit support for currying (afaik in 2023 August), but in those cases you can hack it with builder methods to an extent.

Finally, if you want to understand the middle of the midwit meme, check out this wiki article and connect the free monoid to the Kleene star (0 or more copies of your pattern) and Kleene plus (1 or more copies of your pattern). Those are also in regex so it can help you remember the regex symbols. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_monoid?wprov=sfti1

The simplest example might be {0}^* in which case

0: “” // because we use *

Hello! I'm trying to learn JAX over the next couple of weeks. Ideally, I want to be comfortable with using it for projects after about 3 weeks to a month, although I understand that may not be realistic. I currently have experience with PyTorch and TensorFlow. How should I go about learning JAX? Is there a specific YouTube tutorial or online course I should use, or should I just use the tutorial on https://jax.readthedocs.io/? Any information, advice, or experience you can share would be much appreciated!