Get Started with ORT for Java

The ONNX runtime provides a Java binding for running inference on ONNX models on a JVM.

Contents

Supported Versions

Java 8 or newer

Builds

Release artifacts are published to Maven Central for use as a dependency in most Java build tools. The artifacts are built with support for some popular plaforms.

Version Shield

Artifact Description Supported Platforms
com.microsoft.onnxruntime:onnxruntime CPU Windows x64, Linux x64, macOS x64
com.microsoft.onnxruntime:onnxruntime_gpu GPU (CUDA) Windows x64, Linux x64

For building locally, please see the Java API development documentation for more details.

For customization of the loading mechanism of the shared library, please see advanced loading instructions.

API Reference

The Javadoc is available here.

Sample

An example implementation is located in src/test/java/sample/ScoreMNIST.java.

Once compiled the sample code expects the following arguments ScoreMNIST [path-to-mnist-model] [path-to-mnist] [scikit-learn-flag]. MNIST is expected to be in libsvm format. If the optional scikit-learn flag is supplied the model is expected to be produced by skl2onnx (so expects a flat feature vector, and produces a structured output), otherwise the model is expected to be a CNN from pytorch (expecting a [1][1][28][28] input, producing a vector of probabilities). Two example models are provided in testdata, cnn_mnist_pytorch.onnx and lr_mnist_scikit.onnx. The first is a LeNet5 style CNN trained using PyTorch, the second is a logistic regression trained using scikit-learn.

The unit tests contain several examples of loading models, inspecting input/output node shapes and types, as well as constructing tensors for scoring.

Get Started

Here is simple tutorial for getting started with running inference on an existing ONNX model for a given input data. The model is typically trained using any of the well-known training frameworks and exported into the ONNX format.

Note the code presented below uses syntax available from Java 10 onwards. The Java 8 syntax is similar but more verbose.

To start a scoring session, first create the OrtEnvironment, then open a session using the OrtSession class, passing in the file path to the model as a parameter.

    var env = OrtEnvironment.getEnvironment();
    var session = env.createSession("model.onnx",new OrtSession.SessionOptions());

Once a session is created, you can execute queries using the run method of the OrtSession object. At the moment we support OnnxTensor inputs, and models can produce OnnxTensor, OnnxSequence or OnnxMap outputs. The latter two are more likely when scoring models produced by frameworks like scikit-learn.

The run call expects a Map<String,OnnxTensor> where the keys match input node names stored in the model. These can be viewed by calling session.getInputNames() or session.getInputInfo() on an instantiated session. The run call produces a Result object, which contains a Map<String,OnnxValue> representing the output. The Result object is AutoCloseable and can be used in a try-with-resources statement to prevent references from leaking out. Once the Result object is closed, all it’s child OnnxValues are closed too.

    OnnxTensor t1,t2;
    var inputs = Map.of("name1",t1,"name2",t2);
    try (var results = session.run(inputs)) {
        // manipulate the results
    }

You can load your input data into OnnxTensor objects in several ways. The most efficient way is to use a java.nio.Buffer, but it’s possible to use multidimensional arrays too. If constructed using arrays the arrays must not be ragged.

    FloatBuffer sourceData;  // assume your data is loaded into a FloatBuffer
    long[] dimensions;       // and the dimensions of the input are stored here
    var tensorFromBuffer = OnnxTensor.createTensor(env,sourceData,dimensions);

    float[][] sourceArray = new float[28][28];  // assume your data is loaded into a float array 
    var tensorFromArray = OnnxTensor.createTensor(env,sourceArray);

Here is a complete sample program that runs inference on a pretrained MNIST model.

Run on a GPU or with another provider (optional)

To enable other execution providers like GPUs simply turn on the appropriate flag on SessionOptions when creating an OrtSession.

    int gpuDeviceId = 0; // The GPU device ID to execute on
    var sessionOptions = new OrtSession.SessionOptions();
    sessionOptions.addCUDA(gpuDeviceId);
    var session = environment.createSession("model.onnx", sessionOptions);

The execution providers are prioritized in the order they are enabled.