TensorFlow White Papers

This document identifies white papers about TensorFlow.

Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

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Abstract: TensorFlow is an interface for expressing machine learning algorithms, and an implementation for executing such algorithms. A computation expressed using TensorFlow can be executed with little or no change on a wide variety of heterogeneous systems, ranging from mobile devices such as phones and tablets up to large-scale distributed systems of hundreds of machines and thousands of computational devices such as GPU cards. The system is flexible and can be used to express a wide variety of algorithms, including training and inference algorithms for deep neural network models, and it has been used for conducting research and for deploying machine learning systems into production across more than a dozen areas of computer science and other fields, including speech recognition, computer vision, robotics, information retrieval, natural language processing, geographic information extraction, and computational drug discovery. This paper describes the TensorFlow interface and an implementation of that interface that we have built at Google. The TensorFlow API and a reference implementation were released as an open-source package under the Apache 2.0 license in November, 2015 and are available at www.tensorflow.org.

In BibTeX format

If you use TensorFlow in your research and would like to cite the TensorFlow system, we suggest you cite this whitepaper.

@misc{tensorflow2015-whitepaper,
title={ {TensorFlow}: Large-Scale Machine Learning on Heterogeneous Systems},
url={http://tensorflow.org/},
note={Software available from tensorflow.org},
author={
    Mart\'{\i}n~Abadi and
    Ashish~Agarwal and
    Paul~Barham and
    Eugene~Brevdo and
    Zhifeng~Chen and
    Craig~Citro and
    Greg~S.~Corrado and
    Andy~Davis and
    Jeffrey~Dean and
    Matthieu~Devin and
    Sanjay~Ghemawat and
    Ian~Goodfellow and
    Andrew~Harp and
    Geoffrey~Irving and
    Michael~Isard and
    Yangqing Jia and
    Rafal~Jozefowicz and
    Lukasz~Kaiser and
    Manjunath~Kudlur and
    Josh~Levenberg and
    Dan~Man\'{e} and
    Rajat~Monga and
    Sherry~Moore and
    Derek~Murray and
    Chris~Olah and
    Mike~Schuster and
    Jonathon~Shlens and
    Benoit~Steiner and
    Ilya~Sutskever and
    Kunal~Talwar and
    Paul~Tucker and
    Vincent~Vanhoucke and
    Vijay~Vasudevan and
    Fernanda~Vi\'{e}gas and
    Oriol~Vinyals and
    Pete~Warden and
    Martin~Wattenberg and
    Martin~Wicke and
    Yuan~Yu and
    Xiaoqiang~Zheng},
  year={2015},
}

Or in textual form:

Martín Abadi, Ashish Agarwal, Paul Barham, Eugene Brevdo,
Zhifeng Chen, Craig Citro, Greg S. Corrado, Andy Davis,
Jeffrey Dean, Matthieu Devin, Sanjay Ghemawat, Ian Goodfellow,
Andrew Harp, Geoffrey Irving, Michael Isard, Rafal Jozefowicz, Yangqing Jia,
Lukasz Kaiser, Manjunath Kudlur, Josh Levenberg, Dan Mané, Mike Schuster,
Rajat Monga, Sherry Moore, Derek Murray, Chris Olah, Jonathon Shlens,
Benoit Steiner, Ilya Sutskever, Kunal Talwar, Paul Tucker,
Vincent Vanhoucke, Vijay Vasudevan, Fernanda Viégas,
Oriol Vinyals, Pete Warden, Martin Wattenberg, Martin Wicke,
Yuan Yu, and Xiaoqiang Zheng.
TensorFlow: Large-scale machine learning on heterogeneous systems,
2015. Software available from tensorflow.org.

TensorFlow: A System for Large-Scale Machine Learning

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Abstract: TensorFlow is a machine learning system that operates at large scale and in heterogeneous environments. TensorFlow uses dataflow graphs to represent computation, shared state, and the operations that mutate that state. It maps the nodes of a dataflow graph across many machines in a cluster, and within a machine across multiple computational devices, including multicore CPUs, generalpurpose GPUs, and custom-designed ASICs known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs). This architecture gives flexibility to the application developer: whereas in previous “parameter server” designs the management of shared state is built into the system, TensorFlow enables developers to experiment with novel optimizations and training algorithms. TensorFlow supports a variety of applications, with a focus on training and inference on deep neural networks. Several Google services use TensorFlow in production, we have released it as an open-source project, and it has become widely used for machine learning research. In this paper, we describe the TensorFlow dataflow model and demonstrate the compelling performance that TensorFlow achieves for several real-world applications.