Real Python: PyTorch vs Tensorflow for Your Python Deep Learning Project

PyTorch vs TensorFlow: What’s the difference? Both are open source Python libraries that use graphs to perform numerical computation on data. Both are used extensively in academic research and commercial code. Both are extended by a variety of APIs, cloud computing platforms, and model repositories.

If they’re so similar, then which one is best for your project?

In this tutorial, you’ll learn:

• What the differences are between PyTorch and TensorFlow
• What tools and resources are available for each
• How to choose the best option for your specific use case

You’ll start by taking a close look both platforms, beginning with the slightly older TensorFlow, before exploring some considerations that can help you determine which choice is best for your project. Let’s get started!

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What Is TensorFlow?#

TensorFlow was developed by Google and released as open source in 2015. It grew out of Google’s homegrown machine learning software, which was refactored and optimized for use in production.

The name “TensorFlow” describes how you organize and perform operations on data. The basic data structure for both TensorFlow and PyTorch is a tensor. When you use TensorFlow, you perform operations on the data in these tensors by building a stateful dataflow graph, kind of like a flowchart that remembers past events.

Who Uses TensorFlow?#

TensorFlow has a reputation for being a production-grade deep learning library. It has a large and active user base and a proliferation of official and third-party tools and platforms for training, deploying, and serving models.

After PyTorch was released in 2016, TensorFlow declined in popularity. But in late 2019, Google released TensorFlow 2.0, a major update that simplified the library and made it more user-friendly, leading to renewed interest among the machine learning community.

Code Style and Function#

Before TensorFlow 2.0, TensorFlow required you to manually stitch together an abstract syntax tree—the graph—by making tf.* API calls. It then required you to manually compile the model by passing a set of output tensors and input tensors to a session.run() call.

A Session object is a class for running TensorFlow operations. It contains the environment in which Tensor objects are evaluated and Operation objects are executed, and it can own resources like tf.Variable objects. The most common way to use a Session is as a context manager.

In TensorFlow 2.0, you can still build models this way, but it’s easier to use eager execution, which is the way Python normally works. Eager execution evaluates operations immediately, so you can write your code using Python control flow rather than graph control flow.

To see the difference, let’s look at how you might multiply two tensors using each method. Here’s an example using the old TensorFlow 1.0 method:

>>>

>>> import tensorflow as tf

>>> tf.compat.v1.disable_eager_execution()

>>> x = tf.compat.v1.placeholder(tf.float32, name = "x")
>>> y = tf.compat.v1.placeholder(tf.float32, name = "y")

>>> multiply = tf.multiply(x, y)

>>> with tf.compat.v1.Session() as session:
...     m = session.run(
...         multiply, feed_dict={x: [[2., 4., 6.]], y: [[1.], [3.], [5.]]}
...     )
...     print(m)
[[ 2.  4.  6.]
 [ 6. 12. 18.]
 [10. 20. 30.]]

This code uses TensorFlow 2.x’s tf.compat API to access TensorFlow 1.x methods and disable eager execution.

Read the full article at https://realpython.com/pytorch-vs-tensorflow/ »

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