In this chapter, we will introduce the bare minimum lower level Tensorflow APIs to get started building and training models.

0. Setups for this section
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
from pprint import pprint
print(tf.__version__)
tf.random.set_seed(42)

2.1.0

1. Tensors

Tensors are the objects that flow through operations(i.e., they are the inputs and the same time outputs of operations). They are N-dimensional arrays that hold elements of the same data type. The tensor objects in Tensorflow all have the shape and dtype properties, where shape is the number of elements that the tensor houses in each dimension, and dtype is the data type that all the elements within the tensor belong to.

Let’s create some tensors from python and numpy objects using tf.constant and see their shapes and dtypes.

scalar = tf.constant(1, dtype=tf.int8)
vector = tf.constant([1, 2, 3], dtype=tf.float32)
matrix = tf.constant(np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4]]), dtype=tf.float32)
pprint([scalar, vector, matrix])

[<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=int8, numpy=1>,
<tf.Tensor: shape=(3,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([1., 2., 3.], dtype=float32)>,
<tf.Tensor: shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[1., 2.],
[3., 4.]], dtype=float32)>]


Under the hood, __repr__ is using the shape accessor to get the shape information of the tensors. We can also use the tf.shape operation to get the shape of a tensor object.

print(matrix.shape)
pprint(tf.shape(matrix))
print(id(matrix))

(2, 2)
<tf.Tensor: shape=(2,), dtype=int32, numpy=array([2, 2], dtype=int32)>
139880719227424


As for data type, we can’t change a tensors’ dtype with a mutator method as we can with numpy ndarrys(like a = np.array([1, 2, 3]); a.dtype = np.float32)). We can only use the tf.cast operation to create a new tensor with the desired new data type.

matrix = tf.cast(matrix, dtype=tf.int8)
pprint(matrix)

<tf.Tensor: shape=(2, 2), dtype=int8, numpy=
array([[1, 2],
[3, 4]], dtype=int8)>
139880719226416


Notice the new tensor has the same values as the original tensor, but with int8 data type and it also has a different id number 4, indicating that it is a new tensor object.

There are handy ways to create special tensors in Tensorflow, let’s just sample a few of them.

o = tf.zeros((2, 2))
x = tf.random.uniform((3, 2))
pprint(o)
pprint(x)
pprint(tf.ones_like(o))

<tf.Tensor: shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[0., 0.],
[0., 0.]], dtype=float32)>
<tf.Tensor: shape=(3, 2), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[0.6645621 , 0.44100678],
[0.3528825 , 0.46448255],
[0.03366041, 0.68467236]], dtype=float32)>
<tf.Tensor: shape=(2, 2), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[1., 1.],
[1., 1.]], dtype=float32)>


We saw earlier that we can convert numpy arrays to Tensors with tf.constant, we can do the reverse with .numpy() method.

x_numpy = x.numpy()
print(type(x_numpy))

<class 'numpy.ndarray'>


We can also explicitly copy tensors to devices.

with tf.device('/cpu:0'):
x_cpu = tf.identity(x)
with tf.device('/gpu:0'):
x_gpu = tf.identity(x)
print(x_cpu.device)
print(x_gpu.device)

/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:CPU:0


Note we can actually do x = x.cpu('0') or x = x.gpu('0') to achieve the same, but these two are deprecating.

2. Operations

Operations takes in tensors and computes output tensors. Both tf.shape and tf.cast we saw earlier are actually tensor operations. Tensorflow provides a rich set of operations around tensors and these operations have routines for gradient computing built in.

Basic math operators in Python are overloaded by corresponding tensor operations. For example:

e = tf.random.uniform((3, 2), dtype=x.dtype)

<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=bool, numpy=True>

• Element-wise multiplication
pprint(tf.math.reduce_all(x.__mul__(e) == tf.multiply(x, e)))

<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=bool, numpy=True>


The tf.linalg module contains linear algebra operations. For example:

• Matrix Multiplication
pprint(tf.math.reduce_all(x.__matmul__(tf.transpose(e)) == tf.linalg.matmul(x, e, transpose_b=True)))

<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=bool, numpy=True>


TODO: work on a list of commonly used Tensorflow operations with example usecases.

Slicing and indexing are operations implemented in the __getitem__ method of tf.Tensor and the behavior is similar to numpy.

pprint(matrix[0, 1])
pprint(matrix[1, :2])
pprint(matrix[tf.newaxis, 1, :2])

<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=int8, numpy=2>
<tf.Tensor: shape=(2,), dtype=int8, numpy=array([3, 4], dtype=int8)>
<tf.Tensor: shape=(1, 2), dtype=int8, numpy=array([[3, 4]], dtype=int8)>

3. Variables

Tensors are immutable, the values in tensors can’t be updated in-place. Variables are just like Tensors in terms of as inputs to operations, but with the in-place value update methods.

We can create variables with tf.Variable.

v = tf.Variable(x)
pprint(v)

<tf.Variable 'Variable:0' shape=(3, 2) dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[0.6645621 , 0.44100678],
[0.3528825 , 0.46448255],
[0.03366041, 0.68467236]], dtype=float32)>


Variables can be inputs to operations just as Tensors, note the output is a Tensor not Variable.

pprint(tf.square(v))

<tf.Tensor: id=65, shape=(3, 2), dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[0.4416428 , 0.19448698],
[0.12452606, 0.21574403],
[0.00113302, 0.46877623]], dtype=float32)>


Variables can be updated with .assign, .assign_add or .assign_sub methods.

v.assign(tf.square(v))
pprint(v)

<tf.Variable 'Variable:0' shape=(3, 2) dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[0.4416428 , 0.19448698],
[0.12452606, 0.21574403],
[0.00113302, 0.46877623]], dtype=float32)>

v.assign_sub(1 * tf.ones_like(v, dtype=v.dtype))
pprint(v)

<tf.Variable 'Variable:0' shape=(3, 2) dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[-0.55835724, -0.805513  ],
[-0.8754739 , -0.784256  ],
[-0.998867  , -0.5312238 ]], dtype=float32)>


Variables are typically used to represent the parameters and the states of the model, whereas the inputs, intermediate results, and outputs are Tensors.

4. Automatic Differentiation

Automatic differentiation is the implementation of the backpropagation algorithm which allows us to compute gradients of the loss function with respect to the model’s parameters through chain rule. To do so, we need to keep track of the tensors and operations along the way. In Tensorflow we use the tf.GradientTape context to trace(recording/taping) what’s happened inside, so that we can calculate the gradients afterward with the .gradient() from the tape object.

a = tf.Variable([4], dtype=tf.float32)
b = tf.Variable([5], dtype=tf.float32)

def f(a, b, power=2, d=3):
return tf.pow(a, power) + d * b

c = f(a, b)


[<tf.Tensor: shape=(1,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([8.], dtype=float32)>,
<tf.Tensor: shape=(1,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([3.], dtype=float32)>]


By default, the context will only keep track of the variables but not the tensors, meaning that we can only ask for gradients with respect to the variables by default (through the watch_accessed_variables argument which defaults to True). But we can explicitly ask the tape to watch things for us.

d = tf.constant(3, dtype=tf.float32)

tape.watch(d)
c = f(a, b, d=d)


[<tf.Tensor: shape=(), dtype=float32, numpy=5.0>]


Note that once we extracted the gradients from the tape, the resources it holds will be released.

with tf.GradientTape() as tape:
c = f(a, b)


[<tf.Tensor: id=153, shape=(1,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([8.], dtype=float32)>]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
RuntimeError                              Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-18-3b2edd8b0b33> in <module>
3
...


We can create a persistent gradient tape object to compute multiple gradients and manually release the resources.

with tf.GradientTape(persistent=True) as tape:
c = f(a, b)

del tape

[<tf.Tensor: shape=(1,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([8.], dtype=float32)>]
[<tf.Tensor: shape=(1,), dtype=float32, numpy=array([3.], dtype=float32)>]

5. Linear Regression

With tensors, variables, operations and automatic differentiation, we can start building models. Let’s train a linear regression model with the gradient descent algorithm.

# ground truth
true_weights = tf.constant(list(range(5)), dtype=tf.float32)[:, tf.newaxis]

# some random training data
x = tf.constant(tf.random.uniform((32, 5)), dtype=tf.float32)
y = tf.constant(x @ true_weights, dtype=tf.float32)

# model parameters
weights = tf.Variable(tf.random.uniform((5, 1)), dtype=tf.float32)

for iteration in range(1001):
y_hat = tf.linalg.matmul(x, weights)
loss = tf.reduce_mean(tf.square(y - y_hat))

if not (iteration % 100):
print('mean squared loss at iteration {:4d} is {:5.4f}'.format(iteration, loss))

pprint(weights)

mean squared loss at iteration    0 is 15.1603
mean squared loss at iteration  100 is 0.2243
mean squared loss at iteration  200 is 0.0586
mean squared loss at iteration  300 is 0.0161
mean squared loss at iteration  400 is 0.0046
mean squared loss at iteration  500 is 0.0013
mean squared loss at iteration  600 is 0.0004
mean squared loss at iteration  700 is 0.0001
mean squared loss at iteration  800 is 0.0000
mean squared loss at iteration  900 is 0.0000
mean squared loss at iteration 1000 is 0.0000
<tf.Variable 'Variable:0' shape=(5, 1) dtype=float32, numpy=
array([[3.1751457e-03],
[1.0003914e+00],
[2.0022070e+00],
[2.9992850e+00],
[3.9944589e+00]], dtype=float32)>


We will use this linear regression training example in the next few chapters and gradually replacing parts of it with higher-level Tensorflow API equivalents.

Appendix. Code for this Chapter