Updates in Chainer v1.8.0 through v1.10.0, and planned features in the upcoming versions. The slides are used at Chainer Meetup #03 in Tokyo.

1. Chainer Update
v1.8.0 -> v1.10.0+
Chainer Meetup #03 @ Dwango
Seiya Tokui, Preferred Networks, Inc.
2016/07/02

2. Updates v1.8.0 -> v1.10.0
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3. Many updates since the last meetup
 v1.8.0 (April 12)
 v1.9.0 (May 31)
 v1.10.0 (June 28)
 Many contributions from the community. Thank you very much!!!!!
(30 PRs from non-PFI/PFNers have been merged since the last meetup in
March)
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4. New core features
 CaffeFunction improved: support Py3, support the ResNet models
 Weight initializer
– Most links start supporting initializer to initialize the parameters
– Sample:
import chainer.links as L, chainer.initializers as I
L.Linear(784, 1000, initialW=I.Normal(0.01),
initialb=I.Constant(0.1))
– Many built-in initializers
– You can also write your own initializer easily
(it is just a function/callable that initializes the elements of a given CPU array)
 Support float16 and float64 in many Functions
 CuPy Profiling API
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5. New core feature (cont.)
 ndarray arguments for Functions
– Function now accepts NumPy/CuPy ndarrays as arguments
– It automatically wraps the arrays by Variable
– Users do not have to wrap arrays by Variable manually
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6. Many Functions/Links are added
 Variable.__getitem__ (F.get_item)
– Variable now supports the basic indexing (cf. NumPy) with backprop
– It supports: integer indexing, slice indexing, newaxis, Ellipsis
– E.g.: slice indexing can be used to crop feature maps
 Array manipulation: cast, clip, log1p, expm1, logsumexp, minimum, permutate
 NN elements: huber_loss, hard_sigmoid, roi_pooling_2d, StatelessLSTM, Bias,
Scale
 There are also many updates on existing Functions/Links (new options,
bug fixes, etc.)
 See the recent release notes for the full list of new Functions/Links
https://github.com/pfnet/chainer/releases
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7. New CuPy functions
 cupy.nonzero
– Enumerates the indices of non-zero elements
– It implements inclusive scan kernel in CUDA
– We are willing to support a wider range of routines that require the scan
kernel (like cumsum)
 In parallel, some routines using nonzero are added: cupy.ix_,
cupy.flatnonzero
 Profiling API (cupy.cuda.profile, cupy.cuda.profiler) to enable CUDA
profile collection only in a specified range of codes
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8. Issue: slow merge of PRs. Solution: more minor releases
 As I noted, there are now many PRs coming to the Chainer repository
 The current release cycle of minor updates per 6 weeks is too slow
 We decided to make minor releases more frequently
Until v1.9.0:
 Revision release (without new features) for every 2 weeks
 Minor release (with new features) for every 6 weeks
From v1.10.0:
 Release for every 2 weeks
 Any release can contain new features (we increment the minor version
in that case)
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9. Planned updates after v1.10.0
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10. Planned big features for upcoming releases (v1.11-12)
 Dataset and Trainer (will be explained)
 cuDNN RNN support
 Theano function support (use a Theano function as a Chainer Function)
 Asynchronous to_gpu

11. Target Link
Dataset
Optimizer
Iterator
Dataset and Trainer
 Dataset: Abstraction of iterations over datasets
 Trainer: Abstraction of training loops
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Trainer
Extension
Extension
Extension
Updater Optimizer
Optimizer
Target Link
Target Link
Iterator
Iterator
Dataset
Dataset
We often use only one
optimizer and one
dataset. This diagram
shows a general case.

12. Trainer
 Call the Updater and Extensions for every iteration
 Updater
– Fetch a mini-batch using Iterator, and update parameters using Optimizer
– You can customize the update routine
– Built-in updater: StandardUpdater, ParallelUpdater (under review)
(ParallelUpdater provides an easy way of data-parallel learning)
 Extension
– It adds an extra routine to the training loop
– Basic extensions are built-in:
Evaluator, LogReport, PrintReport, ProgressBar
snapshot, snapshot_object, ExponentialDecay, LinearShift
dump_graph
– You can write your own extensions
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13. Dataset / Iterator
 Dataset is just a sequence of data points (a.k.a. examples)
 Iterator defines how to iterate over the dataset
 Built-in iterators:
– SequentialIterator
– ShuffledIterator
– MultiprocessIterator
(you can easily support multiprocess preprocessing with it)
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14. Reporter: easy way to report an observation
Trainer uses Reporter to collect observations
(e.g. loss value, accuracy, activation statistics, etc.)
Example (simple Classifier):
class Classifier(chainer.Chain):
def __init__(self, predictor):
super(Classifier, self).__init__(predictor=predictor)
def __call__(self, x, t):
y = self.predictor(x)
loss = F.softmax_cross_entropy(y, t)
accuracy = F.accuracy(y, t)
chainer.report({‘loss’: loss, ‘accuracy’: accuracy},
observer=self)
return loss
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15. MNIST Example
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・・・
Dataset and Iterators
Updater and Trainer
Extensions
Launch training loop
Model and Optimizer

16. Note on Trainer
 If your training workflow is very different from standard ones, you can
still write your own training loop
 We recommend you to use Trainer for newly-written training scripts
– Most usages are covered by the Trainer
– You can flexibly customize each component of Trainer
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17. We are planning the first major version up!
 Planning to release it in this autumn (Oct. – Nov.)
 It will breaks the backward compatibility
Planned features
 Separate CuPy into a separate repository/package
 Plugin system and service (we need discussions with you!)
(share Functions/Links/etc. easily with other users without sending PRs)
 Backprop as a graph (or gradient of expressions including gradients)
 Parameter shape inference (without specifying “input size”)
 Make asynchronous CPU/GPU transfer by default
 Parameter annotation
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