Skip to main content

Welcome to RETURNN

GitHub repository. RETURNN paper 2016, RETURNN paper 2018.

RETURNN - RWTH extensible training framework for universal recurrent neural networks, is a Theano/TensorFlow-based implementation of modern recurrent neural network architectures. It is optimized for fast and reliable training of recurrent neural networks in a multi-GPU environment.

The high-level features and goals of RETURNN are:

  • Simplicity

    • Writing config / code is simple & straight-forward (setting up experiment, defining model)

    • Debugging in case of problems is simple

    • Reading config / code is simple (defined model, training, decoding all becomes clear)

  • Flexibility

    • Allow for many different kinds of experiments / models

  • Efficiency

    • Training speed

    • Decoding speed

All items are important for research, decoding speed is esp. important for production.

See our Interspeech 2020 tutorial “Efficient and Flexible Implementation of Machine Learning for ASR and MT” video (slides) with an introduction of the core concepts.

More specific features include:

  • Mini-batch training of feed-forward neural networks

  • Sequence-chunking based batch training for recurrent neural networks

  • Long short-term memory recurrent neural networks including our own fast CUDA kernel

  • Multidimensional LSTM (GPU only, there is no CPU version)

  • Memory management for large data sets

  • Work distribution across multiple devices

  • Flexible and fast architecture which allows all kinds of encoder-attention-decoder models

See documentation. See basic usage and technological overview.

Here is the video recording of a RETURNN overview talk (slides, exercise sheet; hosted by eBay).

There are many example demos which work on artificially generated data, i.e. they should work as-is.

There are some real-world examples such as setups for speech recognition on the Switchboard or LibriSpeech corpus.

Some benchmark setups against other frameworks can be found here. The results are in the RETURNN paper 2016. Performance benchmarks of our LSTM kernel vs CuDNN and other TensorFlow kernels are in TensorFlow LSTM benchmark.

There is also a wiki. Questions can also be asked on StackOverflow using the RETURNN tag.

https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn/workflows/CI/badge.svg

Metadata

Release files for returnn 1.20220527.111507

For a detailed explanation of source distributions (sdists) and built distributions (wheels), please see the package formats documentation.

Source distribution (sdist)

Source distribution for returnn 1.20220527.111507
File Size Uploaded
returnn-1.20220527.111507.tar.gz 2.0 MB Details

Release files / returnn-1.20220527.111507.tar.gz

Download URL returnn-1.20220527.111507.tar.gz
Size 2.0 MB
Tags Source
SHA-256 checksum
How to use checksums
c5f24e3e4b6ca51d263c3fcf4391334679e0de5e2cf28c82245909bebbe4503e
BLAKE2b-256 checksum
How to use checksums
5504a8937b891f5b186455d79f89db0838fd4298cfe95355392f5381a1f8fb77
Upload date
Uploaded using Trusted Publishing?
What is trusted publishing?
No
Uploaded via twine/4.0.0 CPython/3.9.13

Release history Release notifications | RSS feed

This release

1.20220527.111507 This release

1 release file

1.0.0

2 release files

Anthropic, PBC Visionary sponsor Bloomberg Visionary sponsor Hudson River Trading Visionary sponsor Meta Visionary sponsor NVIDIA Visionary sponsor Microsoft Sustainability sponsor Depot Continuous Integration AWS Cloud computing and Security Sponsor Datadog Monitoring Fastly CDN Google Download Analytics Sentry Error logging StatusPage Status page