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Add a doc with information about components and dependencies #7537

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Add a doc with information about components and dependencies
ericstj Oct 29, 2025
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Formatting fixups and edits
ericstj Oct 29, 2025
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Add a diagram of components
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ericstj Oct 30, 2025
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91 changes: 91 additions & 0 deletions docs/project-docs/components-and-dependencies.md
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ML.NET is a modular system where using it involves building a pipeline from data loaders, trainers/estimators (in case of training), transformers (in case of inferencing), and various data structures to facilitate the building of pipelines and representing data. The core of ML.NET – the Microsoft.ML has no external dependencies. It's largely managed code.



The core ML.NET does have a helper native math library CPUMath - which is only used on .NETFramework. Net6 and later have a managed implementation using intrinsics/TensorPrimitives and do not require the native build of CPUMath.



Microsoft.ML contains one other native library LDANative which is used by the LatentDirichletAllocationTransformer/LatentDirichletAllocationEstimator to support the LightLDA algorithm. If this component is used it will require the LightLDA native library. The native library is built my ML.NET for linux-arm, linux-arm64, linux-x64, osx-arm64 (M1), osx-x64, win-arm64, win-x64, win-x86. This library has only platform/CRT dependencies.



Some components that represent an algorithm or binding to another framework are factored into separate packages to allow opt-in to using those and their dependencies.

ML.NET redistributes Intel MKL as Microsoft.ML.MKL.Redist in which a minimized library is linked with just exports used. This component is follows the support matrix of Intel MKL and is only supported on x86 and x64 architectures: linux-x64, osx-x64 (no longer supported by Intel), win-x64, and win-x86. Similarly some components have light-up to use an Intel OneDAL implementation which is only supported on x64.

| NuGet Package | Entry-Point Components | Native Dependencies | Status | Notes |

|-------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------------------|----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|

| `Microsoft.ML` | `MLContext`, core transforms, trainers | None | Stable | |

| `Microsoft.Extensions.ML` | `PredictionEnginePool` | None | Stable | |

| `Microsoft.ML.AutoML` | `AutoCatalog` for AutoML | \*As required by other components\* | Preview | Support varies based on components used |

| `Microsoft.ML.CodeGenerator` | | None | Preview | Part of AutoML |

| `Microsoft.ML.CpuMath` | | Optional native | Stable | Internal implementation; only used on .NET Framework |

| `Microsoft.ML.DataView` | `IDataView` | None | Stable | |

| `Microsoft.ML.DnnImageFeaturizer.\*` | | None | Preview | Data-only |

| `Microsoft.ML.Ensemble` | | None | Preview | Supports ML.NET component catalog |

| `Microsoft.ML.EntryPoints` | | None | Preview | Supports ML.NET component catalog |

| `Microsoft.ML.Experimental` | | None | Preview | Experimental API |

| `Microsoft.ML.FairLearn` | `FairlearnCatalog` | None | Preview | |

| `Microsoft.ML.FastTree` | `FastTreeRankingTrainer` | Optional native acceleration | Stable | Native library used on x86/x64; managed fallback |

| `Microsoft.ML.ImageAnalytics` | `MLImage` (image exchange type) | `libSkiaSharp` | Stable | Wrapper over SkiaSharp / Google Skia; supported where dependency is supported |

| `Microsoft.ML.LightGBM` | `LightGbm\*Trainer` | `LightGBM` | Stable | Wrapper over LightGBM; supported where dependency is supported |

| `Microsoft.ML.MKL.Components` | `SymbolicSgdLogisticRegressionBinaryTrainer` | Intel MKL | Stable | Only works where Intel MKL works |

| `Microsoft.ML.MKL.Redist` | Internal native Intel MKL | `libomp` | Stable | Not for direct reference; win-x86/x64 only |

| `Microsoft.ML.OneDal` | Internal native Intel OneDal | Intel OneDAL | Preview | Not for direct reference; x64 only |

| `Microsoft.ML.OnnxConverter` | Adds ONNX export support | `Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime` | Stable | Wrapper over ONNX Runtime; supports "bring your own" runtime |

| `Microsoft.ML.OnnxTransformer` | `OnnxCatalog` | `Microsoft.ML.OnnxRuntime` | Stable | Wrapper over ONNX Runtime; supports "bring your own" runtime |

| `Microsoft.ML.Parquet` | `ParquetLoader` | None | Preview | Uses managed Parquet.Net (port of Apache Parquet) |

| `Microsoft.ML.Recommender` | `MatrixFactorizationTrainer` | LIBMF (bundled) | Stable | Includes libmf built for all runtimes supported by ML.NET |

| `Microsoft.ML.TensorFlow` | `TensorFlowModel`, `Transformer`, `Estimator` | TensorFlow via `TensorFlow.NET` | Stable | Wrapper over TensorFlow; supports "bring your own" runtime |

| `Microsoft.ML.TimeSeries` | `ForecastingCatalog` | Intel MKL, `libomp` | Stable | Only works where Intel MKL works |

| `Microsoft.ML.TorchSharp` | `QATrainer`, `TextClassificationTrainer`, `SentenceSimilarityTrainer` | libTorch via `TorchSharp` | Preview | Wrapper over libTorch; supported where TorchSharp is supported |

| `Microsoft.ML.Vision` | `ImageClassificationTrainer` | TensorFlow | Stable | Depends on `Microsoft.ML.TensorFlow` for implementation |





Other packages:
| NuGet Package | Entry-Point Components | Native Dependencies | Status | Notes |

|----------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------|------------|---------|

| `Microsoft.Data.Analysis` | `DataFrame` | `Apache.Arrow` | Preview | |

| `Microsoft.ML.GenAI.\*` | | | Preview | |

| `Microsoft.ML.Tokenizers.\*` | `Tokenizer` | | Stable | |

| `Microsoft.ML.SampleUtils` | | | Preview | |