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Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and PyTorch
book

Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and PyTorch

by Aurélien Géron
October 2025
Intermediate to advanced
878 pages
26h 37m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and PyTorch

Chapter 10. Building Neural Networks with PyTorch

PyTorch is a powerful open source deep learning library developed by Facebook’s AI Research lab (FAIR, now called Meta AI). It is the Python successor of the Torch library, originally written in the Lua programming language. With PyTorch, you can build all sorts of neural network models and train them at scale using GPUs (or other hardware accelerators, as we will see). In many ways it is similar to NumPy, except it also supports hardware acceleration and autodiff (see Chapter 9), and includes optimizers and ready-to-use neural net components.

When PyTorch was released in 2016, Google’s TensorFlow library was by far the most popular: it was fast, it scaled well, and it could be deployed across many platforms. But its programming model was complex and static, making it difficult to use and debug. In contrast, PyTorch was designed from the ground up to provide a more flexible, Pythonic approach to building neural networks. In particular, as you will see, it uses dynamic computation graphs (also known as define-by-run), making it intuitive and easy to debug. PyTorch is also beautifully coded and documented, and focuses on its core task: making it easy to build and train high-performance neural networks. Last but not least, it leans strongly into the open source culture and benefits from an enthusiastic and dedicated community, and a rich ecosystem. In September 2022, PyTorch’s governance was even transferred to the PyTorch Foundation, ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9798341607972Errata Page