An Empirical Study of Common Challenges in Developing Deep Learning Applications Recent advances in deep learning promote the innovation of many intelligent systems and applications such as autonomous driving and image recognition. Despite enormous efforts and investments in this field, a fundamental question remains underinvestigatedxe2x80x94what challenges do developers commonly face when building deep learning applications? To seek an answer, this paper presents a largescale empirical study of deep learning questions in a popular Qu0026A website, Stack Overflow. We manually inspect a sample of 715 questions and identify seven kinds of frequently asked questions. We further build a classification model to quantify the distribution of different kinds of deep learning questions in the entire set of 39,628 deep learning questions. We find that program crashes, model migration, and implementation questions are the top three most frequently asked questions. After carefully examining accepted answers of these questions, we summarize five main root causes that may deserve attention from the research community, including API misuse, incorrect hyperparameter selection, GPU computation, static graph computation, and limited debugging and profiling support. Our results highlight the need for new techniques such as crossframework differential testing to improve software development productivity and software reliability in deep learning.

An Empirical Study Towards Characterizing Deep Learning Development and Deployment Across Different Frameworks and Platforms Deep Learning (DL) has recently achieved tremendous success. A variety of DL frameworks and platforms play a key role to catalyze such progress. However, the differences in architecture designs and implementations of existing frameworks and platforms bring new challenges for DL software development and deployment. Till now, there is no study on how various mainstream frameworks and platforms influence both DL software development and deployment in practice. To fill this gap, we take the first step towards understanding how the most widelyused DL frameworks and platforms support the DL software development and deployment. We conduct a systematic study on these frameworks and platforms by using two types of DNN architectures and three popular datasets. (1) For development process, we investigate the prediction accuracy under the same runtime training configuration or same model weightsbiases. We also study the adversarial robustness of trained models by leveraging the existing adversarial attack techniques. The experimental results show that the computing differences across frameworks could result in an obvious prediction accuracy decline, which should draw the attention of DL developers. (2) For deployment process, we investigate the prediction accuracy and performance (refers to time cost and memory consumption) when the trained models are migratedquantized from PC to real mobile devices and web browsers. The DL platform study unveils that the migration and quantization still suffer from compatibility and reliability issues. Meanwhile, we find several DL software bugs by using the results as a benchmark. We further validate the results through bug confirmation from stakeholders and industrial positive feedback to highlight the implications of our study. Through our study, we summarize practical guidelines, identify challenges and pinpoint new research directions, such as understanding the characteristics of DL frameworks and platforms, avoiding compatibility and reliability issues, detecting DL software bugs, and reducing time cost and memory consumption towards developing and deploying high quality DL systems effectively.