Bindings for CNTK library

Simple low level bindings for CNTK library from Microsoft.

Status

Currently exploring ways how to interact with C++ API nicely from Rust. Expect a lot of breaking changes.

Build scripts are not ready yet, might not work outside of 64bit linux.

Goals

• Ability to train all reasonable architectures
• No memory leaks
• Reasonable ease of use

Nongoals

• Idiomatic Rust everywhere
• Super good ergonomics
• Avoiding all unnecessary copies

Building and installing

You need to have CNTK-2.2 installed and paths to includes and library files in relevant enviroment variables (cntk activate scripts does this well). You also need g++-4.8 installed (because CNTK uses it to compile things).

Example usage

See examples folder.

Other limitations

Only works with single precision (f32 in Rust, float in C++) types. Only works with dense representations of vectors/matrices/tensors. Only works with ASCII strings for variable names and filenames.

What works

• Passing data in and out of computation.
• Backpropagation.
• Training fully connected feedforward, convolutional and recurrent network (have to test bidirectional though).
• Saving and loading the model.
• Code for most operations. - Almost all, except couple of helpers.
• Demo of seq2seq model training.

Planned in future

• Finish all operations.
• Catch all relevant C++ exceptions
• Better build scripts.
• Figure out whether we want NDArrayView or go directly from Rust data to Value and back.
• Interop with some NDArray library.
• Builder pattern where appropriate (Variable?).