The Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) [] is an Open-source software, open-source artificial intelligence ecosystem of technology companies and research organizations that establish open standards for representing machine learning algorithms and software tools to promote innovation and collaboration in the AI sector. ONNX is available on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

History

ONNX was originally named Toffee and was developed by the

PyTorch PyTorch is a machine learning library based on the Torch library, used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella. It is one of the mo ...

team at

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

. In September 2017 it was renamed to ONNX and announced by Facebook and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

. Later,

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

Huawei Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. ("Huawei" sometimes stylized as "HUAWEI"; ; zh, c=华为, p= ) is a Chinese multinational corporationtechnology company in Longgang, Shenzhen, Longgang, Shenzhen, Guangdong. Its main product lines include teleco ...

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

AMD Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California and maintains significant operations in Austin, Texas. AMD is a hardware and fabless company that de ...

Arm In human anatomy, the arm refers to the upper limb in common usage, although academically the term specifically means the upper arm between the glenohumeral joint (shoulder joint) and the elbow joint. The distal part of the upper limb between ...

and

Qualcomm Qualcomm Incorporated () is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Diego, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. It creates semiconductors, software and services related to wireless techn ...

announced support for the initiative. In October 2017, Microsoft announced that it would add its Cognitive Toolkit and Project Brainwave platform to the initiative. In November 2019 ONNX was accepted as graduate project in Linux Foundation AI. In October 2020 Zetane Systems became a member of the ONNX ecosystem.

Intent

The initiative targets:

Framework interoperability

Allow developers to more easily move between frameworks, some of which may be more desirable for specific phases of the development process, such as fast training, network architecture flexibility or inferencing on mobile devices.

Shared optimization

Allow hardware vendors and others to improve the performance of

artificial neural network In machine learning, a neural network (also artificial neural network or neural net, abbreviated ANN or NN) is a computational model inspired by the structure and functions of biological neural networks. A neural network consists of connected ...

s of multiple frameworks at once by targeting the ONNX representation.

ONNX provides definitions of an extensible computation graph model, built-in operators and standard

data type In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a collection or grouping of data values, usually specified by a set of possible values, a set of allowed operations on these values, and/or a representation of these ...

s, focused on inferencing (evaluation). Each computation

dataflow In computing, dataflow is a broad concept, which has various meanings depending on the application and context. In the context of software architecture, data flow relates to stream processing or reactive programming. Software architecture Dat ...

graph is a list of nodes that form an acyclic graph. Nodes have inputs and outputs. Each node is a call to an operator. Metadata documents the graph. Built-in operators are to be available on each ONNX-supporting framework.

References

External links

* * {{Microsoft FOSS Microsoft free software Software using the Apache license Neural network data exchange formats 2017 software Applied machine learning