PyTorch and TensorFlow: Which ML Framework is More Popular in Academia and Industry

Horace He recently published an article summarising The State of Machine Learning Frameworks in 2019. The article utilizes several metrics to argue the point that PyTorch is quickly becoming the dominant framework for research, whereas TensorFlow is the dominant framework for applications deployed within a commercial/industrial context. He, a research student at Cornell University, counted the number of papers discusing either PyTorch or TensorFlow that were presented at a series of well-known machine learning oriented conferences, namely ECCV, NIPS, ACL, NAACL, ICML, CVPR, ICLR, ICCV and EMNLP. In summary, the majority of papers were implemented in PyTorch for every major conference in 2019. PyTorch outnumbered TensorFlow by 2:1 in vision related conferences and 3:1 in language related conferences.