Baidu Releases PaddlePaddle Upgrades

An updated release of Baidu's deep learning framework includes a batch of new features ranging from inference capabilities for Internet of Things (IoT) applications to a natural language processing (NLP) framework for Mandarin. The latest version of PaddlePaddle released this week includes a streamlined toolkit dubbed Paddle Lite 2.0 aimed at inference for IoT, embedded and mobile devices. It works with PaddlePaddle as well as pre-trained models from other sources, Chinese Internet giant (NASDAQ: BIDU) said. Along with faster deployment of ResNet-50, used for image classification on convolutional neural networks, Paddle Lite 2.0 also supports edge-based FPGAs and other hardware. New development kits include ERNIE 2.0, and updated version of Baidu's natural language processing framework.