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The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit

The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit - CNTK - is a unified deep-learning toolkit by Microsoft. This video provides a high-level view of the toolkit.

It can be included as a library in your Python or C++ programs, or used as a standalone machine learning tool through its own model description language (BrainScript). CNTK supports 64-bit Linux or 64-bit Windows operating systems. To install you can either choose pre-compiled binary packages, or compile the Toolkit from the source provided in Github.

The latest release of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit is v 2.0, released on June 1st, 2017.

Here are a few pages to get started:

2017-06-01. CNTK 2.0 The first production release of Cognitive Toolkit v.2.

Highlights:

  • CNTK backend for Keras.
  • Extremely fast binary convolution with Halide.
  • Java API.
  • A new set of NuGet Packages.
  • Multiple bug fixes.

See more in the Release Notes. Get the Release from the CNTK Releases page.

2017-05-24. CNTK 2.0 Release Candidate 3
Release Candidate 3 is the final preview of Cognitive Toolkit v.2.0.

Highlights:

  • API that were previously declared deprecated are now removed. See details in release notes.
  • Introduction of CNTK Java API in experimental mode. See details in release notes.
  • New operators like to_sequence and sequence.unpack.
  • Support of convolution in 1D.
  • Support of UDF serialization (available both in Python and native in C++).
  • New tools (Crosstalk and RNN Conversion).
  • Support of NVIDIA cuDNN v.6.0 when CNTK is built by the user from source code.
  • A new set of NuGet Packages.
  • Multiple bug fixes.

See more in the Release Notes.
Get the Release from the CNTK Releases page.

2017-04-21. CNTK 2.0 Release Candidate 2
With Release Candidate 2 we reacted to customer feedback and improved/added features, functionality, and performance.

Highlights:

  • New operators like pow, sequence.reduce_max, sequence.softmax.
  • New feature for Linux source builds (GPU Direct RDMA support in distributed gradients aggregation, NCCL support for Python in V2 gradients aggregation).
  • Support for Python 3.6 for source and binary installation; see here.
  • UserMinibatchSource to write custom minibatch sources; see here.
  • New C# APIs: class NDArrayView and methods, SetMaxNumCPUThreads(), GetMaxNumCPUThreads(), SetTraceLevel(), GetTraceLevel()
  • A new set of NuGet Packages is provided with this Release.

The release notes contain an overview. Get the release from the CNTK Releases Page.

2017-03-31. CNTK 2.0 Release Candidate 1 With Release Candidate 1 the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit enters the final set of enhancements before release of the production version of CNTK 2.0.

Highlights:

2017-03-16. V 2.0 Beta 15 Release available at Docker Hub
CNTK V 2.0 Beta 15 Runtime packages are now available as Public Images at Docker Hub.
See more on CNTK as Docker Images in this Wiki article.

2017-03-15. V 2.0 Beta 15 Release
Highlights of this Release:

  • In addition to pre-existing python support, added support for TensorBoard output in BrainScript. Read more here.
  • Learners can now be implemented in pure Python by means of UserLearners. Read more here.
  • New debugging helpers: dump_function(), dump_signature().
  • Tensors can be indexed using advanced indexing. E.g. x[[0,2,3]] would return a tensor that contains the first, third and fourth element of the first axis.
  • Significant updates in the Layers Library of Python API. See Release Notes for detailed description.
  • Updates and new examples in C# API.
  • Various bug fixes.

See more in the Release Notes.
Get the Release from the CNTK Releases page.

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