Why does the basic static, compiled computation graph structure of TF (as opposed to a dynamic graph) necessitate a dedicated while loop node and doesn't enable the use "regular" Python control flow expressions?
Thanks.
TensorFlow builds the computational graph and makes it static (unchangeable) for efficiency. Once it's finalized, telling the TensorFlow graph to do something is like sending some input to a separate program which you can no longer change besides passing in different inputs. So the TensorFlow graph at that point has no knowledge of the Python control flow. It just runs when called. Because of this, it needs to explicitly know ahead of time where you want to add in a while loop inside the TensorFlow graph. You can however, still use Python control flow and just call the TensorFlow graph as though it were a specific function.
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I am using tensorflow 1.12 and the eager execution mode. I want to summarize the graph to the tensorboard log. I found a function called tf.contrib.summary.graph, however, it requires a parameter called param. What should I pass for this parameter? Thanks.
As documented, the param parameter is for the graph object, which in eager can be a tf.Graph, tf.GraphDef, or a string containing a serialized GraphDef protocol buffer.
Note that in eager execution, by definition there isn't a single computation graph any more because the ops execute immediately instead of building a graph, so this is unlikely to be useful unless you're building traditional tf.Graph computation graphs in addition to running logic eagerly. We may introduce some ways to record graphs in eager mode for TF 2.0, but there still won't be a single graph.
I am trying to write code that is eager and graph compatible. However, there is very little information online for how to do this, being a literal footnote on TensorFlow's website. Furthermore, what they have wrote is confusing, saying:
The same code written for eager execution will also build a graph during graph execution. Do this by simply running the same code in a new Python session where eager execution is not enabled.
This implies that a same code solution is possible, where the only change required is the addition or removal of tf.enable_eager_execution().
Currently I use tf.keras to define my model and tf.data for my input pipeline. However, many eager operations don't work in graph, with the opposite also being true.
For example, I keep track of my number of epochs using tf.train.Checkpoint(). In eager mode, after restoring I can access it using epochs.numpy() to assign its value to a local variable. However, this does not work with graphs, which instead would require sess.run(epochs) due to the values not being defined during execution.
Again, to compute my gradients in eager I need to use some form of autograd, in my case tf.GradientTape(). This is not compatible with graphs, as "tf.GradientTape.gradients() does not support graph control flow."
I see that tfe.py_func exists, but once again, this only works when eager is not enabled, thus not helping for this problem.
So how do I make a same code solution, when it seems that many aspects of eager and graph directly conflict with each other?
When I was learning tensorflow, one basic concept of tensorflow was computational graphs, and the graphs was said to be static.
And I found in Pytorch, the graphs was said to be dynamic.
What's the difference of static Computational Graphs in tensorflow and dynamic Computational Graphs in Pytorch?
Both frameworks operate on tensors and view any model as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), but they differ drastically on how you can define them.
TensorFlow follows ‘data as code and code is data’ idiom. In TensorFlow you define graph statically before a model can run. All communication with outer world is performed via tf.Session object and tf.Placeholder which are tensors that will be substituted by external data at runtime.
In PyTorch things are way more imperative and dynamic: you can define, change and execute nodes as you go, no special session interfaces or placeholders. Overall, the framework is more tightly integrated with Python language and feels more native most of the times. When you write in TensorFlow sometimes you feel that your model is behind a brick wall with several tiny holes to communicate over. Anyways, this still sounds like a matter of taste more or less.
However, those approaches differ not only in a software engineering perspective: there are several dynamic neural network architectures that can benefit from the dynamic approach. Recall RNNs: with static graphs, the input sequence length will stay constant. This means that if you develop a sentiment analysis model for English sentences you must fix the sentence length to some maximum value and pad all smaller sequences with zeros. Not too convenient, huh. And you will get more problems in the domain of recursive RNNs and tree-RNNs. Currently Tensorflow has limited support for dynamic inputs via Tensorflow Fold. PyTorch has it by-default.
Reference:
https://medium.com/towards-data-science/pytorch-vs-tensorflow-spotting-the-difference-25c75777377b
https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/5w3q74/d_so_pytorch_vs_tensorflow_whats_the_verdict_on/
Both TensorFlow and PyTorch allow specifying new computations at any point in time. However, TensorFlow has a "compilation" steps which incurs performance penalty every time you modify the graph. So TensorFlow optimal performance is achieved when you specify the computation once, and then flow new data through the same sequence of computations.
It's similar to interpreters vs. compilers -- the compilation step makes things faster, but also discourages people from modifying the program too often.
To make things concrete, when you modify the graph in TensorFlow (by appending new computations using regular API, or removing some computation using tf.contrib.graph_editor), this line is triggered in session.py. It will serialize the graph, and then the underlying runtime will rerun some optimizations which can take extra time, perhaps 200usec. In contrast, running an op in previously defined graph, or in numpy/PyTorch can be as low as 1 usec.
In tensorflow you first have to define the graph, then you execute it.
Once defined you graph is immutable: you can't add/remove nodes at runtime.
In pytorch, instead, you can change the structure of the graph at runtime: you can thus add/remove nodes at runtime, dynamically changing its structure.
I was hoping someone more familiar with the TensorFlow library could help with a simple question. I would like to know how the tensorflow add operation is implemented.
Other tensorflow ops are registered and defined kernels, but where/how are basic arithmetic operations handled?
https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/tree/master/tensorflow/core/kernels
The tf.add() Python function is an automatically generated wrapper function (currently in the module tensorflow.python.ops.gen_math_ops) that adds a node to the current default TensorFlow graph.
When you run a graph containing that node (via tf.Session.run()), the TensorFlow runtime will invoke an instance of BinaryOp<Device, tensorflow::functor::add>, which is contains some code that is common across all componentwise binary operations (e.g. for broadcasting and argument validation), and an invocation of tensorflow::functor::add(), which uses Eigen's scalar_sum_op to perform the addition.
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.