Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN, Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, President and CEO: Toru Nishikawa) has released Chainer v3, a major update of the open source deep learning framework Chainer^(R), as well as NVIDIA^(R) GPU array calculation library CuPy™ v2.

We release a major upgrade of Chainer every three months that quickly incorporates the results of the latest deep learning research. The newly released Chainer v3 will run without the need to change most of your code.

Main features of Chainer v3 and CuPy v2 include:

1.  Automatic differentiation of second and higher order derivatives

Chainer now supports automatic differentiation of second order and higher derivatives in many functions. This will enable users to easily implement deep learning methods that require second order differentiation as per equations written in papers.

2. Improved CuPy memory allocation

In many neural nets, memory efficiency when using GPUs will improve significantly, and reallocation of memory will be reduced in some cases, increasing speed.

3. Sparse matrix support has been added to CuPy

Large-scale graph analysis and natural language processing, which have previously been highly costly to implement on GPUs, can now be implemented more easily thanks to sparse matrix calculation being available on the GPU.

◆ Chainer ReleaseNote: https://github.com/chainer/chainer/releases/tag/v3.0.0

Chainer v3 has taken in a number of development results from external contributors as its previous versions did. PFN will continue working with supporting companies and the OSS community to promote the development and popularization of Chainer.

◆ About the Chainer Open Source Deep Learning Framework

Chainer is a Python-based deep learning framework developed by PFN, which has unique features and powerful performance that enables users to easily and intuitively design complex neural networks, thanks to its “Define-by-Run” approach. Since it was open-sourced in June 2015, as one of the most popular frameworks, Chainer has attracted not only the academic community but also many industrial users who need a flexible framework to harness the power of deep learning in their research and real-world applications.

Chainer incorporates the results of the latest deep learning research. With additional packages such as ChainerMN (distributed learning), ChainerRL (reinforcement learning), ChainerCV (computer vision) and through the support of Chainer development partner companies, PFN aims to promote the most advanced research and development activities of researchers and practitioners in each field. （http://chainer.org/）

＊Chainer^(R) and CuPy^TM are the trademark or the registered trademark of Preferred Networks, Inc. in Japan and other countries.