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The Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit

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

The latest release of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit 2.0 is RC1 (release candidate 1). If you are a previous user of the toolkit, see this page for more information about (breaking) changes in this release.

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.

Here are a few pages to get started:

• Setting up CNTK on your machine
• Tutorials, Examples, etc..
  • Try the tutorials on Azure Notebooks with pre-installed CNTK
• The CNTK Library APIs
  • Using CNTK from Python
  • Using CNTK from C++
• CNTK as a machine learning tool through BrainScript
• How to contribute to CNTK
• Give us feedback through these channels.

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:

• The release candidate contains all changes and improvements introduced in CNTK 2.0 during beta phase.
• Enables Caffe-converted pretrained models on image classification including AlexNet, ResNet, VGG and BN-Inception.
• Slice now supports multiple-axis slicing.
• Improves performance and memory footprint
• Improvements in the device selection API.
• New Python model debugging functions.
• Improvements in Python and C# API. See the release notes for detailed description.
• New file names for CNTK libraries and dlls.

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

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.

2017-02-28. V 2.0 Beta 12 Release available at Docker Hub
CNTK V 2.0 Beta 12 Runtime packages are now available as Public Images at Docker Hub.
See more on CNTK as Docker Images in this Wiki article.

2017-02-23. V 2.0 Beta 12 Release
Highlights of this Release:

• New and updated features: new activation functions, support of Argmax and Argmin, improved performance of numpy interop, new functionality of existing operators, and more.
• CNTK for CPU on Windows can now be installed via pip install on Anaconda 3. Other configurations will be enabled soon.
• HTK deserializers are now exposed in Python. All deserializers are exposed in C++.
• The memory pool implementation of CNTK has been updated with a new global optimization algorithm. Hyper memory compression has been removed.
• New features in C++ API.
• New Eval examples for RNN models.
• New CNTK NuGet Packages with CNTK V2 C++ Library.

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

2017-02-13. V 2.0 Beta 11 Release available at Docker Hub
CNTK V 2.0 Beta 11 Runtime packages are now available as Public Images at Docker Hub.
See more on CNTK as Docker Images in this Wiki article.

See all news.