How to get summary information on tensorflow RNN

Question

I implemented a simple RNN using tensorflow, shown below:

cell = tf.contrib.rnn.BasicRNNCell(state_size)
cell = tf.contrib.rnn.DropoutWrapper(cell, output_keep_prob=keep_prob)

rnn_outputs, final_state = tf.nn.dynamic_rnn(cell, batch_size, dypte=tf.float32)

This works fine. But I'd like to log the weight variables to summary writer. Is there any way to do this?

By the way, do we use tf.nn.rnn_cell.BasicRNNCell or tf.contrib.rnn.BasicRNNCell? Or are they identical?

Answer 1

But I'd like to log the weight variables to summary writer. Is there any way to do this?

You can get a variable via tf.get_variable() function. tf.summary.histogram accepts the tensor instance, so it'd be easier to use Graph.get_tensor_by_name():

n_steps = 2
n_inputs = 3
n_neurons = 5

X = tf.placeholder(dtype=tf.float32, shape=[None, n_steps, n_inputs])
basic_cell = tf.nn.rnn_cell.BasicRNNCell(num_units=n_neurons)
outputs, states = tf.nn.dynamic_rnn(basic_cell, X, dtype=tf.float32)

with tf.variable_scope('rnn', reuse=True):
  print(tf.get_variable('basic_rnn_cell/kernel'))

kernel = tf.get_default_graph().get_tensor_by_name('rnn/basic_rnn_cell/kernel:0')
tf.summary.histogram('kernel', kernel)

By the way, do we use tf.nn.rnn_cell.BasicRNNCell or tf.contrib.rnn.BasicRNNCell? Or are they identical?

Yes, they are synonyms, but I prefer to use tf.nn.rnn_cell package, because everything in tf.contrib is sort of experimental and can be changed in 1.x versions.