AI · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to Boldly go where Gradient Descent has never gone before with DiscoGrad

Trying to do gradient descent using automatic differentiation over branchy programs? Or to combine them with neural networks for end-to-end training? Then this might be interesting to you. We develped DiscoGrad, a tool for automatic differentiation through C++ programs involving input-dependent control flow (e.g., "if (f(x) < c) { ... }", differentiating wrt. x) and randomness. Our initial motivation was to enable the use of gradient descent with simulations, which often rely heavily on such discrete branching. The latter makes plain autodiff mostly useless, since it can only account for the…

DiscoGrad is an automatic differentiation tool for C++ programs that contain input-dependent branching and randomness. It enables gradient descent optimization through simulations and complex programs where traditional… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Boldly go where Gradient Descent has never gone before with DiscoGrad launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

1
I wrote an autodiff in C++ and implemented LeNet with it▲36
2024 · gitlab.com · its alternatives →
2
Autograd.c – A tiny ML framework built from scratch▲85
built a tiny pytorch clone in c after going through prof. vijay janapa reddi's mlsys book: mlsysbook.ai/tinytorch/ perfect for learning how ml frameworks work under the hood :)
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
3
Microcrad – Micrograd Reimplemented in C▲79
A re-implementation of Karpathy's micrograd in C. Contribute to oraziorillo/microcrad development by creating an account on GitHub.
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
4
Gradient°▲191
Deep learning platform built for developers
2018 · paperspace.com · its alternatives →
5
Grade▲112
Complementary gradients generated from images
2016 · benhowdle.im · its alternatives →
6
A radically more scalable alternative to Bayesian Optimization▲96
Experimental Global Optimization Algorithm. Contribute to chrisstroemel/Simple development by creating an account on GitHub.
2018 · github.com · its alternatives →
7
A perceptron with stochastic gradient descent in Go▲94
A single / multi layer / recurrent neural network written in Golang. - made2591/go-perceptron-go
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
8
Neural Network Evolution Playground with Backprop NEAT▲73
2016 · blog.otoro.net · its alternatives →
9
Terminal-Bench-RL: Training long-horizon terminal agents with RL▲125
After training calculator agent via RL, I really wanted to go bigger! So I built RL infrastructure for training long-horizon terminal/coding agents that scales from 2x A100s to 32x H100s (~$1M worth of compute!) Without any training, my 32B agent hit #19 on Terminal-Bench leaderboard, beating Stanford's Terminus-Qwen3-235B-A22! With training... well, too expensive, but I bet the results would be good! *What I did*: - Created a Claude Code-inspired agent (system msg + tools) - Built Docker-isolated GRPO training where each rollout gets its own container - Developed a multi-agent…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
10AI
An Interactive Guide to Teach Derivatives and Backpropagation▲119
2023 · x0axz.com · its alternatives →
11
Monostate AItraining▲59
Fine-tuning, RL, and inference in one CLI
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
12
TensorFlow 1.0▲80
Open-source machine learning library by Google
2018 · tensorflow.org · its alternatives →
13
A weekend replication of STOKE, a stochastic superoptimiser▲58
Haskell re-implementation of STOKE, the stochastic superoptimizer - blaze/notebooks/tutorial.ipynb at master · bollu/blaze
2019 · github.com · its alternatives →
14
Deep learning without gradient descent, 500 layers, no skip connections▲5
Code that reproduces experiments from a scientific paper - xolod7/polyharmonic-cascade
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
15
The No-Code Tool I built for my own AI Experiments▲5
Hi guys, I’m excited to share an update on ReproModel, an open-source toolbox designed to streamline the testing and reproduction of machine learning models. I, like many of you, have really struggled with benchmarking and comparing models, from missing code, to opaque experiment parameters slowing the process. I decided to take matters into my own hands, and created a mini-toolbox in my free time to streamline the process. The goal is to reduce the time and effort spent on replicating experiments, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than setup. Knowing this task is not an…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
16
Zipslicer, a library for loading LLM checkpoints on consumer hardware▲38
This is a low-level opensource library I developed for my own use and decided to share, as it makes it possible to process large checkpoints of neural networks without renting high-RAM instances, on a regular PC. It replaces torch.load() with a custom function that produces a dictionary that materializes tensors on the fly. Compared to other solutions it doesn't require sharding or re-encoding checkpoints and uses them completely as-is. It is a foundation to make it possible to run inference and compress language models and other large models one layer at a time - in principle, even one…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
17
Agentic CUDA Kernel Optimizer▲37
A langgraph based workflow with a C++ CUDA suite to optimize CUDA kernels - bertaye/agentic-cuda-optimizer
28d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
18
Modular Diffusion – A modular Python library for diffusion models▲40
Hello everyone! I've been working on this project for a few months as part of my thesis in Machine Learning. It's meant to be a library that provides an easy-to-use but flexible API to design and train Diffusion Models. I decided to make it because I wanted to quickly prototype a Diffusion Model but there were no good tools to do it with. I think it really can help people prototype their own Diffusion Models a lot faster and only in a few lines of code. The base idea is to have a Model class that takes different modules corresponding to the different aspects of the Diffusion Model process…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
19FT
Fluent, tiny lang for reactivity and autograd▲6
After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!
Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io · its alternatives →
20LT
Learning to (Learn at Test Time)▲13
I’m excited to share a project I’ve been working on for over a year, which I believe will fundamentally change our approach to language models. We’ve designed a new architecture, which replaces the hidden state of an RNN with a machine learning model. This model compresses context through actual gradient descent on input tokens. We call our method “Test-Time-Training layers.” TTT layers directly replace attention, and unlock linear complexity architectures with expressive memory, allowing us to train LLMs with millions (someday billions) of tokens in context. Our instantiations, TTT-Linear…
2024 · its alternatives →
21
High speed graphics rendering research with tinygrad/tinyJIT▲31
I saw a tweet that tinygrad is so good that you could make a graphics library that wraps tg. So I’ve been hacking on a gtinygrad, and honestly it convinced me it could be used for legit research. The JIT + tensor model ends up being a really nice way to express light transport all in simple python, so I reimplemented some new research papers from SIGGRAPH like REstir PG and SZ and it just works. instead of complicated cpp its just a 200 LOC of python.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
22
I built a deep learning engine from scratch in Python▲30
I’ve spent the last few months building a deep learning engine completely from scratch in Python (using only math and random). What started as a basic linear algebra calculator project grew into a symbolic tensor system with autodiff, custom matrix ops, attention mechanisms, LayerNorm, GELU, and even a text generation demo trained on the Brown corpus. I'm still an undergrad, so my main goal is to deeply understand how deep learning actually works under the hood - gradients, attention, backpropagation, optimizers - by building it step-by-step with full visibility into everything, and without…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
23
Minimal LLM Post-Training Experiments on an 8GB GPU (SFT, DPO, GRPO)▲21
Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
24
Minigrad – a small neural network lib in Golang▲9
I built a neural network library in golang on an autograd engine. Faster and easy to use like PyTorch. Please give it a try and share your feedback. if you like it, a github star will be appreciated.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

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