Tensorflow difference between tf.stop_gradient and feed variables to optimizer? - tensorflow

I'm trying to train a model in self-supervised learning. The flow chart is something like the following:
Let's assume that N1 is already trained and we want to train just N2. This is my current implementation:
x_1 = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 128, 128, 1])
x_2 = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, 128, 128, 1])
s_t1 = tf.stop_gradient(N1(x_1)) # treat s_t1 as a constant
s_t2_pred = N2(s_t1))
s_t2 = tf.stop_gradient(N1(x_2)) # treat s_t2 as a constant
loss = some_loss_function(s_t2, s_t2_pred)
train_op = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(lr).minimize(loss)
In this way, I should be optimizing only N2. What makes me confused is the fact that if I were to use the following code I would obtain very different results (much better than the above):
# treat everything as a variable:
s_t1 = N1(x_1)
s_t2_pred = N2(s_t1)
s_t2 = N1(x_2)
loss = some_loss_function(s_t2, s_t2_pred)
var_list = take_all_variables_in_N2()
train_op = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(lr).minimize(loss, var_list)
I wonder what is the problem with the first implementation. What is exactly the behaviour of tf.stop_gradient (the documentation is a bit poor)? How does this differ from the second approach?
From a practical perspective in semi-supervised learning: what is the difference between the two? Which one is the correct approach?
Thank you :)
I added a possible solution to the problem in the comments below. I would still be happy to receive any feedback from more experienced users and to share some opinions on the best approach to structure a self-supervised learning problem in tensorflow.
Bye, G.

I found a possible solution to my question and I'm posting it here, in case someone may find it useful.
Apparently, tf.stop_gradients() only stops the new gradients to be back-propagated through the layers, but: if we have a momentum term (e.g. when using Adam or RMSProp) the variables of such layers could still be updated due to some gradients cumulated in the past (contained in the momentum term). Let's have a look at the simple case of SGD + Momentum; the formula would be:
w1 = w0 - a*grad(loss) - b*v0
where w1 and w0 are the weights at time 0 and 1, a is the learning rate v0 is the accumulated velocity (a function of the past gradients). Using tf.stop_gradients() is equivalent to multiplying the second term for zero. Then, the update rule becomes:
w1 = w0 - b*v0
e.g. we still have a momentum component that can update the weights.
A workaround to this problem would be to explicitly passing the variables to be updated to the optimizer. For example:
var_list = take_all_variables_in_N2()
train_op = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(lr).minimize(loss, var_list)
References:
[1] http://ruder.io/optimizing-gradient-descent/
[2] Using stop_gradient with AdamOptimizer in TensorFlow

Related

Where is backpropagation performed in this example

I have an example of DNN learning XOR (right click to open in new tab): https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1M5xFp4gaXPCbnejM8-5_yLp1B6UvwdL8
I'm confused in these 2 lines (related to backpropagation):
Grads = T.gradient(Loss,[W1,B1,W2,B2]);
Optim.apply_gradients(zip(Grads,[W1,B1,W2,B2]));
I'm guessing the backward loop is at T.gradient because those are gradient values related to loss, but I'm still not clear. The questions are:
Question1. Is there backpropagation (the backward loop) in those 2 lines?
Question2. If there is backpropagation, it's at T.gradient or Optim.apply_gradients?
Question3. Because backpropagation is done backward, is the order of [W1,B1,W2,B2] important? I believe, eg. this shuffled [B1,W2,B2,W1] can't be the same, because backpropagation needs layer order from output back to input.
From my trying, when shuffling the order of weights and biases in the variable array, the optimisation process is still working. But backpropagation needs layer order from output back to input, I don't get this.
Source code:
#!pip install tensorflow==2.0.0rc2
%tensorflow_version 2.x
%reset -f
#libs
import tensorflow as tf;
#data
X = [[0,0],[0,1],[1,0],[1,1]];
Y = [[0], [1], [1], [0] ];
X = tf.convert_to_tensor(X,tf.float32);
Y = tf.convert_to_tensor(Y,tf.float32);
#model
W1 = tf.Variable(tf.random.uniform([2,20],-1,1));
B1 = tf.Variable(tf.random.uniform([ 20],-1,1));
W2 = tf.Variable(tf.random.uniform([20,1],-1,1));
B2 = tf.Variable(tf.random.uniform([ 1],-1,1));
#tf.function
def feedforward(X):
H1 = tf.nn.leaky_relu(tf.matmul(X,W1) + B1);
Out = tf.sigmoid(tf.matmul(H1,W2) + B2);
return Out;
#end def
#train
Optim = tf.keras.optimizers.SGD(1e-1);
Steps = 1000;
for I in range(Steps):
if I%(Steps/10)==0:
Out = feedforward(X);
Loss = tf.reduce_sum(tf.square(Y-Out));
print("Loss:",Loss.numpy());
#end if
with tf.GradientTape() as T:
Out = feedforward(X);
Loss = tf.reduce_sum(tf.square(Y-Out));
#end with
#BACKPROPAGATION HERE?
Grads = T.gradient(Loss,[W1,B1,W2,B2]);
Optim.apply_gradients(zip(Grads,[W1,B1,W2,B2]));
#end for
Out = feedforward(X);
Loss = tf.reduce_sum(tf.square(Y-Out));
print("Loss:",Loss.numpy(),"(Last)");
print("\nDone.");
#eof
Let's take this one step at a time.
Step 1: Calculation of Gradients:
Grads = T.gradient(Loss,[W1,B1,W2,B2])
Here, we calculate the gradients of the loss with respect to the variables in the provided list. The list of gradients is indexed based on the indices of the variables. This means that Grads[0] will be the gradients with respect to W1, and so on.
Step 2: Next, we perform the update. This is done in:
Optim.apply_gradients(zip(Grads,[W1,B1,W2,B2]))
Here, Grads[0] are used to update W1, Grads[1] to update B1 and so on.
Note that gradient calculation and the update steps are performed separately. So as long as the variables appear in the same order in both lists, there shouldn't be any problems.
Also, GradientTape has to be used with Eager Execution.
With TensorFlow 2 in default eager mode, and even without the #tf.function decorator to make graph. TensorFlow is still tracking the relation between tensors while calculation: https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/272000/142160
TensorFlow tracks every variables here:
with tf.GradientTape() as T:
Out = feedforward(X);
Loss = tf.reduce_sum(tf.square(Y-Out));
It is automatic differentiation (kinda Monte Carlo method) instead of mathematical differentiation, and thus, all gradients obtained by the following function is already at their proper depths in backpropagation (just like the backward loop to calculate errors at all layers):
Grads = T.gradient(Loss,[W1,B1,W2,B2]);
After that, optimiser will apply gradients to change weights and biases:
Optim.apply_gradients(zip(Grads,[W1,B1,W2,B2]));

How can I improve my LSTM accuracy in Tensorflow

I'm trying to figure out how to decrease the error in my LSTM. It's an odd use-case because rather than classifying, we are taking in short lists (up to 32 elements long) and outputting a series of real numbers, ranging from -1 to 1 - representing angles. Essentially, we want to reconstruct short protein loops from amino acid inputs.
In the past we had redundant data in our datasets, so the accuracy reported was incorrect. Since removing the redundant data our validation accuracy has gotten much worse, which suggests our network had learned to memorise the most frequent examples.
Our dataset is 10,000 items, split 70/20/10 between train, validation and test. We use a bi-directional, LSTM as follows:
x = tf.cast(tf_train_dataset, dtype=tf.float32)
output_size = FLAGS.max_cdr_length * 4
dmask = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, output_size], name="dmask")
keep_prob = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, name="keepprob")
sizes = [FLAGS.lstm_size,int(math.floor(FLAGS.lstm_size/2)),int(math.floor(FLAGS.lstm_size/ 4))]
single_rnn_cell_fw = tf.contrib.rnn.MultiRNNCell( [lstm_cell(sizes[i], keep_prob, "cell_fw" + str(i)) for i in range(len(sizes))])
single_rnn_cell_bw = tf.contrib.rnn.MultiRNNCell( [lstm_cell(sizes[i], keep_prob, "cell_bw" + str(i)) for i in range(len(sizes))])
length = create_length(x)
initial_state = single_rnn_cell_fw.zero_state(FLAGS.batch_size, dtype=tf.float32)
initial_state = single_rnn_cell_bw.zero_state(FLAGS.batch_size, dtype=tf.float32)
outputs, states = tf.nn.bidirectional_dynamic_rnn(cell_fw=single_rnn_cell_fw, cell_bw=single_rnn_cell_bw, inputs=x, dtype=tf.float32, sequence_length = length)
output_fw, output_bw = outputs
states_fw, states_bw = states
output_fw = last_relevant(FLAGS, output_fw, length, "last_fw")
output_bw = last_relevant(FLAGS, output_bw, length, "last_bw")
output = tf.concat((output_fw, output_bw), axis=1, name='bidirectional_concat_outputs')
test = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, [None, output_size], name="train_test")
W_o = weight_variable([sizes[-1]*2, output_size], "weight_output")
b_o = bias_variable([output_size],"bias_output")
y_conv = tf.tanh( ( tf.matmul(output, W_o)) * dmask, name="output")
Essentially, we use 3 layers of LSTM, with 256, 128 and 64 units each. We take the last step of both the Forward and Backward passes and concatenate them together. These feed into a final, fully connected layer that presents the data in the way we need it. We use a mask to set these steps we don't need to zero.
Our cost function uses a mask again, and takes the mean of the squared difference. We build the mask from the test data. Values to ignore are set to -3.0.
def cost(goutput, gtest, gweights, FLAGS):
mask = tf.sign(tf.add(gtest,3.0))
basic_error = tf.square(gtest-goutput) * mask
basic_error = tf.reduce_sum(basic_error)
basic_error /= tf.reduce_sum(mask)
return basic_error
To train the net I've used a variety of optimizers. The lowest scores have been obtained with the AdamOptimizer. The others, such as Adagrad, Adadelta, RMSProp tend to flatline around 0.3/0.4 error which is not particularly great.
Our learning rate is 0.004, batch size of 200. We use a 0.5 probability dropout layer.
I've tried adding more layers, changing learning rates, batch sizes, even the representation of the data. I've attempted batch regularisation, L1 and L2 weight regularisation (though perhaps incorrectly) and I've even considered switching to a convnet approach instead.
Nothing seems to make any difference. What has seemed to work is changing the optimizer. Adam seems noisier as it improves, but it does get closer than the other optimizers.
We need to get down to a value much closer to 0.05 or 0.01. Sometimes the training error touches 0.09 but the validation doesn't follow. I've run this network for about 500 epochs so far (about 8 hours) and it tends to settle around 0.2 validation error.
I'm not quite sure what to attempt next. Decayed learning rate might help but I suspect there is something more fundamental I need to do. It could be something as simple as a bug in the code - I need to double check the masking,

How to freeze/lock weights of one TensorFlow variable (e.g., one CNN kernel of one layer)

I have a TensorFlow CNN model that is performing well and we would like to implement this model in hardware; i.e., an FPGA. It's a relatively small network but it would be ideal if it were smaller. With that goal, I've examined the kernels and find that there are some where the weights are quite strong and there are others that aren't doing much at all (the kernel values are all close to zero). This occurs specifically in layer 2, corresponding to the tf.Variable() named, "W_conv2". W_conv2 has shape [3, 3, 32, 32]. I would like to freeze/lock the values of W_conv2[:, :, 29, 13] and set them to zero so that the rest of the network can be trained to compensate. Setting the values of this kernel to zero effectively removes/prunes the kernel from the hardware implementation thus achieving the goal stated above.
I have found similar questions with suggestions that generally revolve around one of two approaches;
Suggestion #1:
tf.Variable(some_initial_value, trainable = False)
Implementing this suggestion freezes the entire variable. I want to freeze just a slice, specifically W_conv2[:, :, 29, 13].
Suggestion #2:
Optimizer = tf.train.RMSPropOptimizer(0.001).minimize(loss, var_list)
Again, implementing this suggestion does not allow the use of slices. For instance, if I try the inverse of my stated goal (optimize only a single kernel of a single variable) as follows:
Optimizer = tf.train.RMSPropOptimizer(0.001).minimize(loss, var_list = W_conv2[:,:,0,0]))
I get the following error:
NotImplementedError: ('Trying to optimize unsupported type ', <tf.Tensor 'strided_slice_2228:0' shape=(3, 3) dtype=float32>)
Slicing tf.Variables() isn't possible in the way that I've tried it here. The only thing that I've tried which comes close to doing what I want is using .assign() but this is extremely inefficient, cumbersome, and caveman-like as I've implemented it as follows (after the model is trained):
for _ in range(10000):
# get a new batch of data
# reset the values of W_conv2[:,:,29,13]=0 each time through
for m in range(3):
for n in range(3):
assign_op = W_conv2[m,n,29,13].assign(0)
sess.run(assign_op)
# re-train the rest of the network
_, loss_val = sess.run([optimizer, loss], feed_dict = {
dict_stuff_here
})
print(loss_val)
The model was started in Keras then moved to TensorFlow since Keras didn't seem to have a mechanism to achieve the desired results. I'm starting to think that TensorFlow doesn't allow for pruning but find this hard to believe; it just needs the correct implementation.
A possible approach is to initialize these specific weights with zeros, and modify the minimization process such that gradients won't be applied to them. It can be done by replacing the call to minimize() with something like:
W_conv2_weights = np.ones((3, 3, 32, 32))
W_conv2_weights[:, :, 29, 13] = 0
W_conv2_weights_const = tf.constant(W_conv2_weights)
optimizer = tf.train.RMSPropOptimizer(0.001)
W_conv2_orig_grads = tf.gradients(loss, W_conv2)
W_conv2_grads = tf.multiply(W_conv2_weights_const, W_conv2_orig_grads)
W_conv2_train_op = optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(W_conv2_grads, W_conv2))
rest_grads = tf.gradients(loss, rest_of_vars)
rest_train_op = optimizer.apply_gradients(zip(rest_grads, rest_of_vars))
tf.group([rest_train_op, W_conv2_train_op])
I.e,
Preparing a constant Tensor for canceling the appropriate gradients
Compute gradients only for W_conv2, then multiply element-wise with the constant W_conv2_weights to zero the appropriate gradients and only then apply gradients.
Compute and apply gradients "normally" to the rest of the variables.
Group the 2 train ops to a single training op.

How to define weight decay for individual layers in TensorFlow?

In CUDA ConvNet, we can write something like this (source) for each layer:
[conv32]
epsW=0.001
epsB=0.002
momW=0.9
momB=0.9
wc=0
where wc=0 refers to the L2 weight decay.
How can the same be achieved in TensorFlow?
You can add all the variables you want to add weight decay to, to a collection name 'variables' and then you calculate the L2 norm weight decay for the whole collection.
# Create your variables
weights = tf.get_variable('weights', collections=['variables'])
with tf.variable_scope('weights_norm') as scope:
weights_norm = tf.reduce_sum(
input_tensor = WEIGHT_DECAY_FACTOR*tf.pack(
[tf.nn.l2_loss(i) for i in tf.get_collection('weights')]
),
name='weights_norm'
)
# Add the weight decay loss to another collection called losses
tf.add_to_collection('losses', weights_norm)
# Add the other loss components to the collection losses
# ...
# To calculate your total loss
tf.add_n(tf.get_collection('losses'), name='total_loss')
get_variable(
name,
shape=None,
dtype=None,
initializer=None,
regularizer=None,
trainable=True,
collections=None,
caching_device=None,
partitioner=None,
validate_shape=True,
use_resource=None,
custom_getter=None)
This is the usage of tensorflow function get_variable. You can easily specify the regularizer to do weight decay.
Following is an example:
weight_decay = tf.constant(0.0005, dtype=tf.float32) # your weight decay rate, must be a scalar tensor.
W = tf.get_variable(name='weight', shape=[4, 4, 256, 512], regularizer=tf.contrib.layers.l2_regularizer(weight_decay))
Both current answers are wrong in that they do not give you "weight decay as in cuda-convnet" but instead L2-regularization, which is different.
When using pure SGD (without momentum) as an optimizer, weight decay is the same thing as adding a L2-regularization term to the loss. When using any other optimizer, this is not true.
Weight decay (don't know how to TeX here, so excuse my pseudo-notation):
w[t+1] = w[t] - learning_rate * dw - weight_decay * w
L2-regularization:
loss = actual_loss + lambda * 1/2 sum(||w||_2 for w in network_params)
Computing the gradient of the extra term in L2-regularization gives lambda * w and thus inserting it into the SGD update equation
dloss_dw = dactual_loss_dw + lambda * w
w[t+1] = w[t] - learning_rate * dw
gives the same as weight decay, but mixes lambda with the learning_rate. Any other optimizer, even SGD with momentum, gives a different update rule for weight decay as for L2-regularization! See the paper Fixing weight decay in Adam for more details. (Edit: AFAIK, this 1987 Hinton paper introduced "weight decay", literally as "each time the weights are updated, their magnitude is also decremented by 0.4%" at page 10)
That being said, there doesn't seem to be support for "proper" weight decay in TensorFlow yet. There are a few issues discussing it, specifically because of above paper.
One possible way to implement it is by writing an op that does the decay step manually after every optimizer step. A different way, which is what I'm currently doing, is using an additional SGD optimizer just for the weight decay, and "attaching" it to your train_op. Both of these are just crude work-arounds, though. My current code:
# In the network definition:
with arg_scope([layers.conv2d, layers.dense],
weights_regularizer=layers.l2_regularizer(weight_decay)):
# define the network.
loss = # compute the actual loss of your problem.
train_op = optimizer.minimize(loss, global_step=global_step)
if args.weight_decay not in (None, 0):
with tf.control_dependencies([train_op]):
sgd = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=1.0)
train_op = sgd.minimize(tf.add_n(tf.get_collection(tf.GraphKeys.REGULARIZATION_LOSSES)))
This somewhat makes use of TensorFlow's provided bookkeeping. Note that the arg_scope takes care of appending an L2-regularization term for every layer to the REGULARIZATION_LOSSES graph-key, which I then all sum up and optimize using SGD which, as shown above, corresponds to actual weight-decay.
Hope that helps, and if anyone gets a nicer code snippet for this, or TensorFlow implements it better (i.e. in the optimizers), please share.
Edit: see also this PR which just got merged into TF.

How to use stop_gradient in Tensorflow

I'm wondering how to use stop_gradient in tensorflow, and the documentation is not clear to me.
I'm currently using stop_gradient to produce the gradient of the loss function w.r.t. the word embeddings in a CBOW word2vec model. I want to just get the value, and not do backpropagation (as I'm generating adversarial examples).
Currently, I'm using the code:
lossGrad = gradients.gradients(loss, embed)[0]
real_grad = lossGrad.eval(feed_dict)
But when I run this, it does the backpropogation anyway! What am I doing wrong, and just as importantly, how can I fix this?
CLARIFICATION: To clarify by "backpropagation" I mean "calculating values and updating model parameters".
UPDATE
If I run the two lines above after the first training step, the I get a different loss after 100 training steps than when I don't run those two lines. I might be fundamentally misunderstanding something about Tensorflow.
I've tried setting using set_random_seed both in the beginning of the graph declaration and before each training step. The total loss is consistent between multiple runs, but not between including/excluding those two lines. So if it's not the RNG causing the disparity, and it's not unanticipated updating of the model parameters between training steps, do you have any idea what would cause this behavior?
SOLUTION
Welp, it's a bit late but here's how I solved it. I only wanted to optimize over some, but not all, variables. I thought that the way to prevent optimizing some variables would be to use stop_grad - but I never found a way to make that work. Maybe there is a way, but what worked for me was to adjust my optimizer to only optimize over a list of variables. So instead of:
opt = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=eta)
train_op = opt.minimize(loss)
I used:
opt = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=eta)
train_op = opt.minimize(loss, var_list=[variables to optimize over])
This prevented opt from updating the variables not in var_list. Hopefully it works for you, too!
tf.stop_gradient provides a way to not compute gradient with respect to some variables during back-propagation.
For example, in the code below, we have three variables, w1, w2, w3 and input x. The loss is square((x1.dot(w1) - x.dot(w2 * w3))). We want to minimize this loss wrt to w1 but want to keep w2 and w3 fixed. To achieve this we can just put tf.stop_gradient(tf.matmul(x, w2*w3)).
In the figure below, I plotted how w1, w2, and w3 from their initial values as the function of training iterations. It can be seen that w2 and w3 remain fixed while w1 changes until it becomes equal to w2 * w3.
An image showing that w1 only learns but not w2 and w3:
import tensorflow as tf
import numpy as np
w1 = tf.get_variable("w1", shape=[5, 1], initializer=tf.truncated_normal_initializer())
w2 = tf.get_variable("w2", shape=[5, 1], initializer=tf.truncated_normal_initializer())
w3 = tf.get_variable("w3", shape=[5, 1], initializer=tf.truncated_normal_initializer())
x = tf.placeholder(tf.float32, shape=[None, 5], name="x")
a1 = tf.matmul(x, w1)
a2 = tf.matmul(x, w2*w3)
a2 = tf.stop_gradient(a2)
loss = tf.reduce_mean(tf.square(a1 - a2))
optimizer = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=0.1)
gradients = optimizer.compute_gradients(loss)
train_op = optimizer.apply_gradients(gradients)
tf. gradients(loss, embed) computes the partial derivative of the tensor loss with respect to the tensor embed. TensorFlow computes this partial derivative by backpropagation, so it is expected behavior that evaluating the result of tf. gradients(...) performs backpropagation. However, evaluating that tensor does not perform any variable updates, because the expression does not include any assignment operations.
tf.stop_gradient() is an operation that acts as the identity function in the forward direction but stops the accumulated gradient from flowing through that operator in the backward direction. It does not prevent backpropagation altogether, but instead prevents an individual tensor from contributing to the gradients that are computed for an expression. The documentation for the operation has more details about the operation, and when to use it.