Announcing TensorFlow Lite

NOV 14, 2017
Posted by the TensorFlow team
Today, we're happy to announce the developer preview of TensorFlow Lite, TensorFlow’s lightweight solution for mobile and embedded devices! TensorFlow has always run on many platforms, from racks of servers to tiny IoT devices, but as the adoption of machine learning models has grown exponentially over the last few years, so has the need to deploy them on mobile and embedded devices. TensorFlow Lite enables low-latency inference of on-device machine learning models.

It is designed from scratch to be:
More and more mobile devices today incorporate purpose-built custom hardware to process ML workloads more efficiently. TensorFlow Lite supports the Android Neural Networks API to take advantage of these new accelerators as they come available.
TensorFlow Lite falls back to optimized CPU execution when accelerator hardware is not available, which ensures your models can still run fast on a large set of devices.

Architecture

The following diagram shows the architectural design of TensorFlow Lite:
The individual components are:
The TensorFlow Lite Model File is then deployed within a Mobile App, where:
Developers can also implement custom kernels using the C++ API, that can be used by the Interpreter.

Models

TensorFlow Lite already has support for a number of models that have been trained and optimized for mobile:
Inception v3 and MobileNets have been trained on the ImageNet dataset. You can easily retrain these on your own image datasets through transfer learning.

What About TensorFlow Mobile?

As you may know, TensorFlow already supports mobile and embedded deployment of models through the TensorFlow Mobile API. Going forward, TensorFlow Lite should be seen as the evolution of TensorFlow Mobile, and as it matures it will become the recommended solution for deploying models on mobile and embedded devices. With this announcement, TensorFlow Lite is made available as a developer preview, and TensorFlow Mobile is still there to support production apps.
The scope of TensorFlow Lite is large and still under active development. With this developer preview, we have intentionally started with a constrained platform to ensure performance on some of the most important common models. We plan to prioritize future functional expansion based on the needs of our users. The goals for our continued development are to simplify the developer experience, and enable model deployment for a range of mobile and embedded devices.
We are excited that developers are getting their hands on TensorFlow Lite. We plan to support and address our external community with the same intensity as the rest of the TensorFlow project. We can't wait to see what you can do with TensorFlow Lite.
For more information, check out the TensorFlow Lite documentation pages.
Stay tuned for more updates.
Happy TensorFlow Lite coding!