Hey! This project was a fun way for me to learn how neural networks operate at the lowest level. It doesn't have any production value in {current_year}, as there are many large and supported frameworks. But it had a huge educational value for me as I explored low-level concepts:

• Optimized matrix computations on CPU with MKL and BLAS, and how to use them in managed .NET environment;
• Offloading computation-heavy math operations to a separate C++ library and integrating it with .NET;
• Supporting a GPU-accelerated mode by creating a separate C++ interface with cuDnn library;
• Stitching together .NET and C++ parts in a unified framework with optimized memory management;
• Unified code for double-precision and single-precision computation;
• Manual forward and backpropagation derivation for different neural network layers;
• Experiments in automatic backpropagation derivation based on forward layers configuration;
• Experiments in genetic algorithms and their applicability in training neural networks;
• All the other glue that makes a bunch of code a framework :)

Have fun exploring the code, as I definetely had fun creating this toy framework!

Retia is a deep learning framework written in C# and designed to be simple and easy to tinker with. Unlike many other frameworks which look like black or gray boxes, you can actually get your hands dirty with Retia. Everything is a subject for debugging, and there are very few abstractions to dig through. Many things are represented as plain old matrices, without all that super generic tensor stuff.

At the same time Retia is damn fast. It's fast on CPU when you just want to poke around with your data, and it's fast on GPU leveraging the latest technologies like cuDnn.

Retia is in an early stage of development. We focused on recurrent networks in order to start somewhere. So now you can build deep GRU models to create language models and other fun stuff. As a matter of fact, Retia is so easily customizable that you can start making your own layers in no time at all!

Retia is following the F5 build paradigm: you should just open the solution in Visual Studio, hit F5 and it should run. You can build CPU-only version just like that. All you need is a C++ compiler installed as part of Visual Studio.

However, if you are building with GPU support, there are some heavy-duty dependencies which you should install by yourself. Refer to Wiki page Building from source for detailed build instructions.

We also use some neat tools and libraries, so you might want to read this wiki page.

Of course you want some examples! The great place to start is a character-level language model. If fact, this is the only example so far, but there will be plenty more! :)

Since Retia is in an early stage of development, please expect breaking changes in public interfaces. We feel that right now it's better to focus on development speed rather than strict backward compatibility.

Of cource when the library reaches its first stable version, we will develop and uphold rather strict compatibility policy.