ForwardDiff.jl VS Pytorch

Compare ForwardDiff.jl vs Pytorch and see what are their differences.

ForwardDiff.jl

Forward Mode Automatic Differentiation for Julia (by JuliaDiff)

Pytorch

Tensors and Dynamic neural networks in Python with strong GPU acceleration (by pytorch)
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ForwardDiff.jl Pytorch
4 338
854 78,016
1.4% 2.7%
5.7 10.0
22 days ago about 11 hours ago
Julia Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

ForwardDiff.jl

Posts with mentions or reviews of ForwardDiff.jl. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-22.
  • The Elements of Differentiable Programming
    5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 22 Mar 2024
    You seem somewhat obsessed with the idea that reverse-mode autodiff is not the same technique as forward-mode autodiff. It makes you,,, angry? Seems like such a trivial thing to act a complete fool over.

    What's up with that?

    Anyway, here's a forward differentiation package with a file that might interest you

    https://github.com/JuliaDiff/ForwardDiff.jl/blob/master/src/...

  • Excited for Julia v1.9
    4 projects | /r/Julia | 23 Feb 2023
    Just so you know, v1.9 doesn't solve the load problems. What it does it gives package authors the tools to solve the problems, specifically precompilation as binaries and package extensions. It won't actually solve the load problems until the packages are updated to effectively make use of these features. This is already underway, https://sciml.ai/news/2022/09/21/compile_time/ with things like and https://github.com/JuliaDiff/ForwardDiff.jl/pull/625, but it is a fairly heavy lift to ensure things aren't invalidating and that everything that's necessary is precompiling.
  • Looking for numerical/iterative approach for determining a value
    2 projects | /r/Julia | 22 Jan 2022
    As a quick way to do it, you can use ForwardDiff.jl to determine the partial with respect to h. Then use a Newton-Raphson algorithm to solve for the value of h. I'm not familiar with the actual problem you're solving so there may be more appropriate ways to solve this based on the shape of your function, but this is my knee-jerk reaction to a problem like this. You could also calculate the partial derivative analytically if that is something that you want.
  • Question About Numerical Derivatives/Gradients: Why has no one yet implemented a gradient function in Julia that is similar to the gradient function in MATLAB and NumPy?
    2 projects | /r/Julia | 25 Aug 2021
    In these discussions, which are the only ones I could find that are the most pertinent and similar to what I'm talking about, https://github.com/JuliaDiff/ForwardDiff.jl/issues/390 and https://discourse.julialang.org/t/differentiation-without-explicit-function-np-gradient/57784 , nobody suggested or answered FiniteDiff.jl's finite differencing gradient for getting the numerical derivatives/gradients of an array of values. The answer is either the diff() function or Interpolations.jl, which I already explained in the post why I would want an alternative to those two options to exist, without having to call NumPy's gradient function.

Pytorch

Posts with mentions or reviews of Pytorch. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-27.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ForwardDiff.jl and Pytorch you can also consider the following projects:

Zygote.jl - 21st century AD

Flux.jl - Relax! Flux is the ML library that doesn't make you tensor

FiniteDiff.jl - Fast non-allocating calculations of gradients, Jacobians, and Hessians with sparsity support

mediapipe - Cross-platform, customizable ML solutions for live and streaming media.

Enzyme.jl - Julia bindings for the Enzyme automatic differentiator

Apache Spark - Apache Spark - A unified analytics engine for large-scale data processing

ChainRules.jl - forward and reverse mode automatic differentiation primitives for Julia Base + StdLibs

flax - Flax is a neural network library for JAX that is designed for flexibility.

NBodySimulator.jl - A differentiable simulator for scientific machine learning (SciML) with N-body problems, including astrophysical and molecular dynamics

tinygrad - You like pytorch? You like micrograd? You love tinygrad! ❤️ [Moved to: https://github.com/tinygrad/tinygrad]

Tullio.jl - ⅀

Pandas - Flexible and powerful data analysis / manipulation library for Python, providing labeled data structures similar to R data.frame objects, statistical functions, and much more