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Comment by 6gvONxR4sf7o | Hacker News Reader

Thanks! One last thing, since I have your ear. The function transformation aspects of jax seem to make their way into downstream libraries like haiku, resulting in a lot of "magic" that can be difficult to examine and debug. Are there any utils you made to make jax's own transformations more transparent, which you think might be helpful to third party transformations?

Higher order functions are difficult in general, and it would be fantastic to have core patterns or tools for breaking them open.

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It sounds like you're concerned about how downstream libraries tend to wrap JAX transformations to handle their own thing? (E.g. `haiku.grad`.)

If so, then allow me to make my usual advert here for Equinox:

https://github.com/patrick-kidger/equinox

This actually works with JAX's native transformations. (There's no `equinox.vmap` for example.)

On higher-order functions more generally, Equinox offers a way to control these quite carefully, by making ubiquitous use of callables that are also pytrees. E.g. a neural network is both a callable in that it has a forward pass, and a pytree in that it records its parameters in its tree structure.

As a matter of fact, you’re preaching to the choir! Equinox is my go-to library for jax NN work!

You're right that downstream libraries have often tended to introduce magic (some more than others), and moreover one library's magic is typically incompatible with other libraries'. It's something that we're working on but we don't have much to show for it yet. Two avenues are:

1. as you say, exposing patterns and tools for library authors to implement transformations/higher-order primitives using JAX's machinery rather than requiring each library to introduce bespoke magic to do the same;

2. adding JAX core infrastructure which directly solves the common problems that libraries tend to solve independently (and with bespoke magic).

Thanks for the info! And I want to be clear that I make all these comments and questions out of a love for the tool. It's one of my favorite tools that I wish I could use at work. The design and community engagement are both fantastic.

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