TensorFlow apply_gradients remotely

Question

I'm trying to split up the minimize function over two machines. On one machine, I'm calling "compute_gradients", on another I call "apply_gradients" with gradients that were sent over the network. The issue is that calling apply_gradients(...).run(feed_dict) doesn't seem to work no matter what I do. I've tried inserting placeholders in place of the tensor gradients for apply_gradients,

  variables = [W_conv1, b_conv1, W_conv2, b_conv2, W_fc1, b_fc1, W_fc2, b_fc2]
  loss = -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y_conv))
  optimizer = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(1e-4)
  correct_prediction = tf.equal(tf.argmax(y_conv,1), tf.argmax(y_,1))
  accuracy = tf.reduce_mean(tf.cast(correct_prediction, "float"))
  compute_gradients = optimizer.compute_gradients(loss, variables)

  placeholder_gradients = []
  for grad_var in compute_gradients:
     placeholder_gradients.append((tf.placeholder('float', shape=grad_var[1].get_shape()) ,grad_var[1]))
  apply_gradients = optimizer.apply_gradients(placeholder_gradients)

then later when I receive the gradients I call

  feed_dict = {}
  for i, grad_var in enumerate(compute_gradients):
        feed_dict[placeholder_gradients[i][0]] = tf.convert_to_tensor(gradients[i])
  apply_gradients.run(feed_dict=feed_dict)

However, when I do this, I get

ValueError: setting an array element with a sequence.

This is only the latest thing I've tried, I've also tried the same solution without placeholders, as well as waiting to create the apply_gradients operation until I receive the gradients, which results in non-matching graph errors.

Any help on which direction I should go with this?

Answer 1

Assuming that each gradients[i] is a NumPy array that you've fetched using some out-of-band mechanism, the fix is simply to remove the tf.convert_to_tensor() invocation when building feed_dict:

feed_dict = {}
for i, grad_var in enumerate(compute_gradients):
    feed_dict[placeholder_gradients[i][0]] = gradients[i]
apply_gradients.run(feed_dict=feed_dict)

Each value in a feed_dict should be a NumPy array (or some other object that is trivially convertible to a NumPy array). In particular, a tf.Tensor is not a valid value for a feed_dict.