How to use PySCIPOpt to change constraints? - scip

I am currently co-supervising a high school student on a research project and she is using PySCIPOpt. We would like to use PySCIPOpt to implement some machine learning method on branching.
We are using the problem here https://miplib.zib.de/instance_details_milo-v13-4-3d-3-0.html. We would like to know if there is a function we can call on PySCIPOpt that gives us the coefficient matrix and RHS vector of this problem, to which we can modify some numbers, and resend it through PySCIPOpt to optimize. The purpose of doing this is to generate more training data to be used on a package such as Scikit-learn.
I have looked through the source code and could only find functions such as chgLhs and chgRhs, but this seems more difficult to use than just editing the entries of the coefficient matrix and RHS vector directly.
Thank you for your help!

Related

Optimization of data-driven function as Tensorflow model

I try to find the optimum of a data-driven function represented as a Tensorflow model.
Means I trained a model to approximate a function and now want to find the optimum of this approximated function using a algorithm and software package/python library like ipopt, ipyopt, casadi, .... Or is there a possibility to do this directly in Tensorflow. I also have to define constraints, so I can't just use simple autodiff to do gradient decent and optimize my input.
Is there any idea how to realize this in an efficient way?
Maybe this image visualizes my problem to better understand what I'm looking for.

Building a deep neural network that produces output that is distributed as multivariate Standard normal distribution

I'm looking for a way to Build a deep neural network that produces output that is distributed as multivariate Standard normal distribution ~N(0,1).
I can use Pytorch or TensorFlow, whichever is easier for this task.
I actually have some input X, which in terms of this question can be assumed to be just a matrix of values ​​from the uniform distribution.
I put the input into the network, whose architecture can currently change.
And I want to get output, so in addition to other requirements I will have from it. I want that if we represent the values ​​obtained by all the possible x's, we get that it looks like a multivariate standard normal distribution ~N(0,1).
What I think needs to be done for this to happen is to choose the right loss function.
To do this, I thought of two ways:
Use of statistical tests.
A loss that tests a large number of properties (mean, standard deviation, ..).
Realizing 2 sounds complicated, so I started with 1.
I was looking for statistical tests already implemented in one of the packages ​​as a loss function, and I did not find anything like that.
I implemented statistical tests by myself to obtain output that is univariate standard normal distribution - and it seemed to work relatively well.
With the realization of multidimensional tests I became more entangled.
Do you know of any understandable tensorflow\pythorch functions that do something similar to what I'm trying to do?
Do you have another idea for the operation?
Do you have any comments regarding the methods I try to work with?
Thanks
Using pytorch functions can help you a lot. Considering that I don't know exactly what you will want with these results, I can refer you to pytorch with this link here.
In this link you will have all the pytorch loss functions and the calculations used in each one of them! just click on one and check how it works and see if it’s what you’re looking for.
For the second topic you can look at this same link I sent the BCEWithLogitcLoss function because it may be what you are looking for.

How to draw samples from a categorical distribution in TensorFlow.js

Issue in short
In Python version of Tensorflow there is a tf.random.categorical() method that draws samples from a categorical distribution. But I can't find a similar method in TensorFlow.js API. So, what is the proper way to draw samples from a categorical distribution in TensorFlow.js?
Issue in details
In Text generation with an RNN tutorial the tf.random.categorical() method is being used in generate_text() function to decide what character should be passed next to the RNN input to generate a sequence.
predicted_id = tf.random.categorical(predictions, num_samples=1)[-1,0].numpy()
I'm experimenting with TensorFlow.js and trying trying to generate a "random" Shakespeare-like writing but in the browser. All parts of the tutorial seems to work well together except the step with using a tf.random.categorical() method.
I guess writing the alternative to tf.random.categorical() function manually should not be that hard, and also there are couple of 3rd-party JavaScript libraries that implement this functionality already, but it looks pretty logical to have it as a part of TensorFlow.js API.
I think you can use tf.multinomial instead.
I peeked at the source code and with name and seed parameters set to None, it is essentially the same as tf.multinomial with some random seeding going on, I guess.

skipping layer in backpropagation in keras

I am using Keras with tensorflow backend and I am curious whether it is possible to skip a layer during backpropagation but have it execute in the forward pass. So here is what I mean
Lambda (lambda x: a(x))
I want to apply a to x in the forward pass but I do not want a to be included in the derivation when the backprop takes place.
I was trying to find a solution bit I could not find anything. Can somebody help me out here?
UPDATE 2
In addition to tf.py_func, there is now an official guide on how to add a custom op.
UPDATE
See this question for an example of writing a custom op with gradient purely in Python without needing to rebuild anything. Note that there are some limitations to the method (see the documentation of tf.py_func).
Not exactly a solution to the problem, but still kind of an answer and too long for comments.
That's not even a Keras issue, but a TensorFlow one. Each op defines its own gradient computation that is used during backpropagation. I you really wanted to something like that, you would need to implement the op into TensorFlow yourself (no easy feat) and define the gradient that you want - because you can't have "no gradient", if anything it would be 1 or 0 (otherwise you can't go on with backpropagation). There is a tf.NoGradient function in TensorFlow which causes an op to propagate zeros, but I don't think it is meant to / can be used out of TensorFlow own internals.
UPDATE
Okay so a bit more of context. TensorFlow graphs are built of ops, which are implemented by kernels; this is basically a 1-to-1 mapping, except that there may be for example a CPU and a GPU kernel for an op, hence the differentiation. The set of ops supported by TensorFlow is usually static, I mean it can change with newer versions, but in principle you cannot add your own ops, because the ops of a graph go into the Protobuf serialized format, so if you made your own ops then you would not be able to share your graph. Ops are then defined at C++ level with the macro REGISTER_OP (see for example here), and kernels with REGISTER_KERNEL_BUILDER (see for example here).
Now, where do gradients come into play? Well, the funny thing is that the gradient of an op is not defined at C++ level; there are ops (and kernels) that implement the gradient of other ops (if you look at the previous files you'll find ops/kernels with the name ending in Grad), but (as far as I'm aware) these are not explicitly "linked" at this level. It seems that the associations between ops and their gradients is defined in Python, usually via tf.RegisterGradient or the aforementioned tf.NoGradient (see for example here, Python modules starting with gen_ are autogenerated with the help of the C++ macros); these registrations inform the backpropagation algorithm about how to compute the gradient of the graph.
So, how to actually work this out? Well, you need to create at least one op in C++ with the corresponding kernel/s implementing the computation that you want for your forward pass. Then, if the gradient computation that you want to use can be expressed with existing TensorFlow ops (which is most likely), you would just need to call tf.RegisterGradient in Python and do the computation there in "standard" TensorFlow. This is quite complicated, but the good news is it's possible, and there's even an example for it (although I think they kinda forgot the gradient registration part in that one)! As you will see, the process involves compiling the new op code into a library (btw I'm not sure if any of this may work on Windows) that is then loaded from Python (obviously this involves going through the painful process of manual compilation of TensorFlow with Bazel). A possibly more realistic example can be found in TensorFlow Fold, an extension of TensorFlow for structured data that register (as of one) one custom operation here through a macro defined here that calls REGISTER_OP, and then in Python it loads the library and register its gradient here through their own registration function defined here that simply calls tf.NotDifferentiable (another name for tf.NoGradient)
tldr: It is rather hard, but it can be done and there are even a couple of examples out there.
As mentioned in #jdehesa's comments. You can implement your function with an "alternative gradient". Forgive me if my math is not correct, but I think a derivative returning "1" would be the correct way to have no effect on the backpropagation while still passing the learning through. For how to construct it, see here. The example I cited goes further and allows you to construct an activation function from a python function. So in place of the spiky function, substitute your function a, and in place of his derivative d_spiky replace it with
def constant(x):
return 1
So on the forward pass, a is applied in the layer and the the backwards pass 1 is applied which should simply pass the weight adjustments through.
You can then just create an Activation layer in Keras using this function.

Why does TensorFlow have a lot of mathematical equations re-implemented?

I was looking through the API in TensorFlow and notice that a lot of mathematical operations that already exist in python and numpy have been re-implemented (or at least given a tensorflow interface). For example:
is there a good reason to do this?
I've been searching over their page but can't find why they'd do this.
I do have some guesses though. One of my main guesses is that they probably want those operations to have some backpropagation effect on whatever Neural network graph that gets implementat. In other words, have their derivatives implemented. Is this one of the reasons? (wish I knew how to even check if my guess is right)
For example, in one of the most basic examples of linear regression, one defines the prediction function that one wants to implement:
product = tf.matmul(x,W)
y = product + b
instead of
product = tf.matmul(x,W)
y = tf.add(product, b)
Somehow the first implementation does not interfere with Stochastic Gradient Descent algorithm for training, so it probably doesn't matter if one uses numpy or tf.add to train? This is one aspect that confuses me, when do I know which one should I be using.
Or maybe they are performance reasons? Or maybe its to give those operations access to GPU if required to use GPUs?
You have to understand that you create a tensorflow graph with this operation, meaning they aren't the same as the numpy functions, they are more an abstraction of them.
Maybe you have noticed that you have to create a session and then evaluate the functions through that session to get a result, where with numpy functions they are executed directly. this is because this graph and its functions define what to do like writing down a formula, but to get results for a specific x (or whatever) you have to insert a value for x. This is what your doing through session and eval.
So to conclude this you define a graph with tensorflow which is a more abstract representation of the functions and the graph also isn't executed at runtime, then it is defined, it will be executed when you call the eval function and through that run the session.
Also notice that you cant mix numpy functions and tensorflow functions directly but you can define own tensorflow functions (https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.9/how_tos/adding_an_op/index.html)
Btw I guess most of the tensorflow functions are using numpy under the hood. :)