Chainer compiler: experimental toolchain to compile and run Chainer models

This is an experimental toolchain expected to be used with Chainer. This project aims to achieve a bunch of correlated goals such as

• Make Python Chainer model deployable without Python runtime
• Efficiently execute Chainer models with optimization techniques
• Integrate Chainer with other systems or domain-specific chips
• Be a playground to try algorithms for neural network frameworks

without sacrificing flexibility and coverage of Chainer.

To achieve these goals, this toolchain

• Translates Python AST to extended ONNX. As this is a compiler rather than an execution tracer, it can export Python code with control-flows (e.g., LSTM with attention written by Python's loop)
• Modifies the graph for optimization, auto-differentiation, etc. It then generates deployable code.
• Runs the exported code with ChainerX's C++ API. Currently, the only backend it supports is a simple virtual machine implemented by ChainerX.

This project is still in the early stage and is not expected to be used by end-users. Interfaces can change quickly and some features may be abandoned. That said, it will be appreciated if you try this a bit and give us any feedbacks. Also, importantly, we are hiring! If you are interested in working on deep learning frameworks, please consider applying to Preferred Networks.

Documentation

• Set up guide
• Overview of components
• Example usage
• Train your model with chainer-compiler
• We realize we need more documents. Just file a bug to ask your questions so we can add documents.

Refereed Paper

Artifacts for the paper "Semi-static type, shape, and symbolic shape inference for dynamic computation graphs" (MAPL 2020) are in the following directories:

• Implementation: chainer_compiler/elichika/typing
• Test cases (Experiment Targets): testcases/pytorch
• Tests (Experiment Results): tests/elichika_typing/pytorch