flashlight

Why we included this project

Flashlight is a machine learning library written entirely in C++, originally built by Facebook AI Research with the same people behind Torch, TensorFlow, and Eigen. That background shows: it includes a tape-based autograd engine, a tensor layer, and a full set of neural network modules, so you can build and train everything from convnets to language models without a Python runtime in the hot path. The repo also ships ready-made applications for speech recognition, image classification, object detection, and language modeling, which makes it a good starting point if you want research code you can actually read and modify. The core stays under 10 MB and around 20,000 lines, and every internal API is open to change, so teams that need to rewrite parts of the training pipeline will find it easier to extend than most fixed frameworks.