More examples

Logistic function

Here’s another straightforward example, though a bit more elaborate than adding two numbers together. Let’s say that you want to compute the logistic curve, which is given by:

A plot of the logistic function, with x on the x-axis and s(x) on the y-axis.

You want to compute the function elementwise on matrices of doubles, which means that you want to apply this function to each individual element of the matrix.

Well, what you do is this:

>>> x = T.dmatrix('x')
>>> s = 1 / (1 + T.exp(-x))
>>> logistic = function([x], s)
>>> logistic([[0, 1], [-1, -2]])
array([[ 0.5       ,  0.73105858],
       [ 0.26894142,  0.11920292]])

The reason logistic is performed elementwise is because all of its operations—division, addition, exponentiation, and division—are themselves elementwise operations.

It is also the case that:

We can verify that this alternate form produces the same values:

>>> s2 = (1 + T.tanh(x / 2)) / 2
>>> logistic2 = function([x], s2)
>>> logistic2([[0, 1], [-1, -2]])
array([[ 0.5       ,  0.73105858],
       [ 0.26894142,  0.11920292]])

Computing more than one thing at the same time

Theano supports functions with multiple outputs. For example, we can compute the elementwise difference, absolute difference, and squared difference between two matrices a and b at the same time:

>>> a, b = T.dmatrices('a', 'b')
>>> diff = a - b
>>> abs_diff = abs(diff)
>>> diff_squared = diff**2
>>> f = function([a, b], [diff, abs_diff, diff_squared])

Note

dmatrices produces as many outputs as names that you provide. It is a shortcut for allocating symbolic variables that we will often use in the tutorials.

When we use the function, it will return the three variables (the printing was reformatted for readability):

>>> f([[1, 1], [1, 1]], [[0, 1], [2, 3]])
[array([[ 1.,  0.],
        [-1., -2.]]),
 array([[ 1.,  0.],
        [ 1.,  2.]]),
 array([[ 1.,  0.],
        [ 1.,  4.]])]

Setting a default value for an argument

Let’s say you want to define a function that adds two numbers, except that if you only provide one number, the other input is assumed to be one. You can do it like this:

>>> from theano import Param
>>> x, y = T.dscalars('x', 'y')
>>> z = x + y
>>> f = function([x, Param(y, default=1)], z)
>>> f(33)
array(34.0)
>>> f(33, 2)
array(35.0)

This makes use of the Param class which allows you to specify properties of your function’s parameters with greater detail. Here we give a default value of 1 for y by creating a Param instance with its default field set to 1.

Inputs with default values must follow inputs without default values (like python’s functions). There can be multiple inputs with default values. These parameters can be set positionally or by name, as in standard Python:

>>> x, y, w = T.dscalars('x', 'y', 'w')
>>> z = (x + y) * w
>>> f = function([x, Param(y, default=1), Param(w, default=2, name='w_by_name')], z)
>>> f(33)
array(68.0)
>>> f(33, 2)
array(70.0)
>>> f(33, 0, 1)
array(33.0)
>>> f(33, w_by_name=1)
array(34.0)
>>> f(33, w_by_name=1, y=0)
array(33.0)

Note

Param does not know the name of the local variables y and w that are passed as arguments. The symbolic variable objects have name attributes (set by dscalars in the example above) and these are the names of the keyword parameters in the functions that we build. This is the mechanism at work in Param(y, default=1). In the case of Param(w, default=2, name='w_by_name'), we override the symbolic variable’s name attribute with a name to be used for this function.

Using shared variables

It is also possible to make a function with an internal state. For example, let’s say we want to make an accumulator: at the beginning, the state is initialized to zero. Then, on each function call, the state is incremented by the function’s argument.

First let’s define the accumulator function. It adds its argument to the internal state, and returns the old state value.

>>> from theano import shared
>>> state = shared(0)
>>> inc = T.iscalar('inc')
>>> accumulator = function([inc], state, updates=[(state, state+inc)])

This code introduces a few new concepts. The shared function constructs so-called shared variables. These are hybrid symbolic and non-symbolic variables. Shared variables can be used in symbolic expressions just like the objects returned by dmatrices(...) but they also have an internal value, that defines the value taken by this symbolic variable in all the functions that use it. It is called a shared variable because its value is shared between many functions. The value can be accessed and modified by the .get_value() and .set_value() methods. We will come back to this soon.

The other new thing in this code is the updates parameter of function. The updates is a list of pairs of the form (shared-variable, new expression). It can also be a dictionary whose keys are shared-variables and values are the new expressions. Either way, it means “whenever this function runs, it will replace the .value of each shared variable with the result of the corresponding expression”. Above, our accumulator replaces the state‘s value with the sum of the state and the increment amount.

Anyway, let’s try it out!

>>> state.get_value()
array(0)
>>> accumulator(1)
array(0)
>>> state.get_value()
array(1)
>>> accumulator(300)
array(1)
>>> state.get_value()
array(301)

It is possible to reset the state. Just use the .set_value() method:

>>> state.set_value(-1)
>>> accumulator(3)
array(-1)
>>> state.get_value()
array(2)

As we mentioned above, you can define more than one function to use the same shared variable. These functions can both update the value.

>>> decrementor = function([inc], state, updates=[(state, state-inc)])
>>> decrementor(2)
array(2)
>>> state.get_value()
array(0)

You might be wondering why the updates mechanism exists. You can always achieve a similar thing by returning the new expressions, and working with them in numpy as usual. The updates mechanism can be a syntactic convenience, but it is mainly there for efficiency. Updates to shared variables can sometimes be done more quickly using in-place algorithms (e.g. low-rank matrix updates). Also, theano has more control over where and how shared variables are allocated, which is one of the important elements of getting good performance on the GPU.

It may happen that you expressed some formula using a shared variable, but you do not want to use its value. In this case, you can use the givens parameter of function which replaces a particular node in a graph for the purpose of one particular function.

>>> fn_of_state = state * 2 + inc
>>> foo = T.lscalar()  # the type (lscalar) must match the shared variable we
>>>                    # are replacing with the ``givens`` list
>>> skip_shared = function([inc, foo], fn_of_state,
        givens=[(state, foo)])
>>> skip_shared(1, 3)  # we're using 3 for the state, not state.value
array(7)
>>> state.get_value()  # old state still there, but we didn't use it
array(0)

The givens parameter can be used to replace any symbolic variable, not just a shared variable. You can replace constants, and expressions, in general. Be careful though, not to allow the expressions introduced by a givens substitution to be co-dependent, the order of substitution is not defined, so the substitutions have to work in any order.

In practice, a good way of thinking about the givens is as a mechanism that allows you to replace any part of your formula with a different expression that evaluates to a tensor of same shape and dtype. givens

Using Random Numbers

Because in Theano you first express everything symbolically and afterwards compile this expression to get functions, using pseudo-random numbers is not as straightforward as it is in numpy, though also not too complicated.

The way to think about putting randomness into Theano’s computations is to put random variables in your graph. Theano will allocate a numpy RandomStream object (a random number generator) for each such variable, and draw from it as necessary. We will call this sort of sequence of random numbers a random stream. Random streams are at their core shared variables, so the observations on shared variables hold here as well.

Brief example

Here’s a brief example. The setup code is:

from theano.tensor.shared_randomstreams import RandomStreams
srng = RandomStreams(seed=234)
rv_u = srng.uniform((2,2))
rv_n = srng.normal((2,2))
f = function([], rv_u)
g = function([], rv_n, no_default_updates=True)    #Not updating rv_n.rng
nearly_zeros = function([], rv_u + rv_u - 2 * rv_u)

Here, ‘rv_u’ represents a random stream of 2x2 matrices of draws from a uniform distribution. Likewise, ‘rv_n’ represents a random stream of 2x2 matrices of draws from a normal distribution. The distributions that are implemented are defined in RandomStreams.

Now let’s use these objects. If we call f(), we get random uniform numbers. The internal state of the random number generator is automatically updated, so we get different random numbers every time.

>>> f_val0 = f()
>>> f_val1 = f()  #different numbers from f_val0

When we add the extra argument no_default_updates=True to function (as in g), then the random number generator state is not affected by calling the returned function. So for example, calling g multiple times will return the same numbers.

>>> g_val0 = g()  # different numbers from f_val0 and f_val1
>>> g_val1 = g()  # same numbers as g_val0!

An important remark is that a random variable is drawn at most once during any single function execution. So the nearly_zeros function is guaranteed to return approximately 0 (except for rounding error) even though the rv_u random variable appears three times in the output expression.

>>> nearly_zeros = function([], rv_u + rv_u - 2 * rv_u)

Seedings Streams

Random variables can be seeded individually or collectively.

You can seed just one random variable by seeding or assigning to the .rng attribute, using .rng.set_value().

>>> rng_val = rv_u.rng.get_value(borrow=True)   # Get the rng for rv_u
>>> rng_val.seed(89234)                         # seeds the generator
>>> rv_u.rng.set_value(rng_val, borrow=True)    # Assign back seeded rng

You can also seed all of the random variables allocated by a RandomStreams object by that object’s seed method. This seed will be used to seed a temporary random number generator, that will in turn generate seeds for each of the random variables.

>>> srng.seed(902340)  # seeds rv_u and rv_n with different seeds each

Sharing Streams between Functions

As usual for shared variables, the random number generators used for random variables are common between functions. So our nearly_zeros function will update the state of the generators used in function f above.

For example:

>>> state_after_v0 = rv_u.rng.get_value().get_state()
>>> nearly_zeros()       # this affects rv_u's generator
>>> v1 = f()
>>> rng = rng.get_value(borrow=True)
>>> rng.set_state(state_after_v0)
>>> rv_u.rng.set_value(rng, borrow=True)
>>> v2 = f()             # v2 != v1

Others Random Distributions

There are other distributions implemented.