Basic Layers

These core layers form the foundation of almost all neural networks.

Flux.ChainType
Chain(layers...)

Chain multiple layers / functions together, so that they are called in sequence on a given input.

m = Chain(x -> x^2, x -> x+1)
m(5) == 26

m = Chain(Dense(10, 5), Dense(5, 2))
x = rand(10)
m(x) == m[2](m[1](x))

Chain also supports indexing and slicing, e.g. m[2] or m[1:end-1]. m[1:3](x) will calculate the output of the first three layers.

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Flux.DenseType
Dense(in::Integer, out::Integer, σ = identity)

Creates a traditional Dense layer with parameters W and b.

y = σ.(W * x .+ b)

The input x must be a vector of length in, or a batch of vectors represented as an in × N matrix. The out y will be a vector or batch of length out.

julia> d = Dense(5, 2)
Dense(5, 2)

julia> d(rand(5))
Array{Float64,1}:
  0.00257447
  -0.00449443
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Convolution and Pooling Layers

These layers are used to build convolutional neural networks (CNNs).

Flux.ConvType
Conv(size, in=>out)
Conv(size, in=>out, relu)

Standard convolutional layer. size should be a tuple like (2, 2). in and out specify the number of input and output channels respectively.

Example: Applying Conv layer to a 1-channel input using a 2x2 window size, giving us a 16-channel output. Output is activated with ReLU.

size = (2,2)
in = 1
out = 16
Conv((2, 2), 1=>16, relu)

Data should be stored in WHCN order (width, height, # channels, batch size). In other words, a 100×100 RGB image would be a 100×100×3×1 array, and a batch of 50 would be a 100×100×3×50 array.

Takes the keyword arguments pad, stride and dilation.

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Flux.MaxPoolType
MaxPool(k)

Max pooling layer. k stands for the size of the window for each dimension of the input.

Takes the keyword arguments pad and stride.

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Flux.GlobalMaxPoolType
GlobalMaxPool()

Global max pooling layer.

Transforms (w,h,c,b)-shaped input into (1,1,c,b)-shaped output, by performing max pooling on the complete (w,h)-shaped feature maps.

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Flux.MeanPoolType
MeanPool(k)

Mean pooling layer. k stands for the size of the window for each dimension of the input.

Takes the keyword arguments pad and stride.

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Flux.GlobalMeanPoolType
GlobalMeanPool()

Global mean pooling layer.

Transforms (w,h,c,b)-shaped input into (1,1,c,b)-shaped output, by performing mean pooling on the complete (w,h)-shaped feature maps.

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Flux.DepthwiseConvType
DepthwiseConv(size, in=>out)
DepthwiseConv(size, in=>out, relu)

Depthwise convolutional layer. size should be a tuple like (2, 2). in and out specify the number of input and output channels respectively. Note that out must be an integer multiple of in.

Data should be stored in WHCN order (width, height, # channels, # batches). In other words, a 100×100 RGB image would be a 100×100×3×1 array, and a batch of 50 would be a 100×100×3×50 array.

Takes the keyword arguments pad, stride and dilation.

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Flux.ConvTransposeType
ConvTranspose(size, in=>out)
ConvTranspose(size, in=>out, relu)

Standard convolutional transpose layer. size should be a tuple like (2, 2). in and out specify the number of input and output channels respectively.

Data should be stored in WHCN order (width, height, # channels, # batches). In other words, a 100×100 RGB image would be a 100×100×3×1 array, and a batch of 50 would be a 100×100×3×50 array.

Takes the keyword arguments pad, stride and dilation.

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Flux.CrossCorType
CrossCor(size, in=>out)
CrossCor(size, in=>out, relu)

Standard cross convolutional layer. size should be a tuple like (2, 2). in and out specify the number of input and output channels respectively.

Example: Applying CrossCor layer to a 1-channel input using a 2x2 window size, giving us a 16-channel output. Output is activated with ReLU.

size = (2,2)
in = 1
out = 16
CrossCor((2, 2), 1=>16, relu)

Data should be stored in WHCN order (width, height, # channels, # batches). In other words, a 100×100 RGB image would be a 100×100×3×1 array, and a batch of 50 would be a 100×100×3×50 array.

Takes the keyword arguments pad, stride and dilation.

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Flux.flattenFunction
flatten(x::AbstractArray)

Transforms (w,h,c,b)-shaped input into (w x h x c,b)-shaped output, by linearizing all values for each element in the batch.

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Recurrent Layers

Much like the core layers above, but can be used to process sequence data (as well as other kinds of structured data).

Flux.RNNFunction
RNN(in::Integer, out::Integer, σ = tanh)

The most basic recurrent layer; essentially acts as a Dense layer, but with the output fed back into the input each time step.

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Flux.LSTMFunction
LSTM(in::Integer, out::Integer)

Long Short Term Memory recurrent layer. Behaves like an RNN but generally exhibits a longer memory span over sequences.

See this article for a good overview of the internals.

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Flux.GRUFunction
GRU(in::Integer, out::Integer)

Gated Recurrent Unit layer. Behaves like an RNN but generally exhibits a longer memory span over sequences.

See this article for a good overview of the internals.

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Flux.RecurType
Recur(cell)

Recur takes a recurrent cell and makes it stateful, managing the hidden state in the background. cell should be a model of the form:

h, y = cell(h, x...)

For example, here's a recurrent network that keeps a running total of its inputs.

accum(h, x) = (h+x, x)
rnn = Flux.Recur(accum, 0)
rnn(2) # 2
rnn(3) # 3
rnn.state # 5
rnn.(1:10) # apply to a sequence
rnn.state # 60
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Other General Purpose Layers

These are marginally more obscure than the Basic Layers. But in contrast to the layers described in the other sections are not readily grouped around a particular purpose (e.g. CNNs or RNNs).

Flux.MaxoutType
Maxout(over)

Maxout is a neural network layer, which has a number of internal layers, which all have the same input, and the maxout returns the elementwise maximium of the internal layers' outputs.

Maxout over linear dense layers satisfies the univeral approximation theorem.

Reference: Ian J. Goodfellow, David Warde-Farley, Mehdi Mirza, Aaron Courville, and Yoshua Bengio.

  1. Maxout networks.

In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on International Conference on Machine Learning - Volume 28 (ICML'13), Sanjoy Dasgupta and David McAllester (Eds.), Vol. 28. JMLR.org III-1319-III-1327. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1302.4389.pdf

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Flux.SkipConnectionType
SkipConnection(layers, connection)

Creates a Skip Connection, of a layer or Chain of consecutive layers plus a shortcut connection. The connection function will combine the result of the layers with the original input, to give the final output.

The simplest 'ResNet'-type connection is just SkipConnection(layer, +), and requires the output of the layers to be the same shape as the input. Here is a more complicated example:

m = Conv((3,3), 4=>7, pad=(1,1))
x = ones(5,5,4,10);
size(m(x)) == (5, 5, 7, 10)

sm = SkipConnection(m, (mx, x) -> cat(mx, x, dims=3))
size(sm(x)) == (5, 5, 11, 10)
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Normalisation & Regularisation

These layers don't affect the structure of the network but may improve training times or reduce overfitting.

Flux.BatchNormType
BatchNorm(channels::Integer, σ = identity;
          initβ = zeros, initγ = ones,
          ϵ = 1e-8, momentum = .1)

Batch Normalization layer. The channels input should be the size of the channel dimension in your data (see below).

Given an array with N dimensions, call the N-1th the channel dimension. (For a batch of feature vectors this is just the data dimension, for WHCN images it's the usual channel dimension.)

BatchNorm computes the mean and variance for each each W×H×1×N slice and shifts them to have a new mean and variance (corresponding to the learnable, per-channel bias and scale parameters).

Use testmode! during inference.

See Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift.

Example:

m = Chain(
  Dense(28^2, 64),
  BatchNorm(64, relu),
  Dense(64, 10),
  BatchNorm(10),
  softmax)
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Flux.DropoutType
Dropout(p, dims = :)

A Dropout layer. In the forward pass, applies the dropout function on the input.

Does nothing to the input once testmode! is true.

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Flux.dropoutFunction
dropout(p, dims = :)

Dropout function. For each input, either sets that input to 0 (with probability p) or scales it by 1/(1-p). The dims argument is to specify the unbroadcasted dimensions, i.e. dims=1 does dropout along columns and dims=2 along rows. This is used as a regularisation, i.e. it reduces overfitting during training.

See also Dropout.

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Flux.AlphaDropoutType
AlphaDropout(p)

A dropout layer. It is used in Self-Normalizing Neural Networks. (https://papers.nips.cc/paper/6698-self-normalizing-neural-networks.pdf) The AlphaDropout layer ensures that mean and variance of activations remains the same as before.

Does nothing to the input once testmode! is false.

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Flux.LayerNormType
LayerNorm(h::Integer)

A normalisation layer designed to be used with recurrent hidden states of size h. Normalises the mean/stddev of each input before applying a per-neuron gain/bias.

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Flux.GroupNormType

Group Normalization. This layer can outperform Batch-Normalization and Instance-Normalization.

GroupNorm(chs::Integer, G::Integer, λ = identity;
          initβ = (i) -> zeros(Float32, i), initγ = (i) -> ones(Float32, i),
          ϵ = 1f-5, momentum = 0.1f0)

$chs$ is the number of channels, the channel dimension of your input. For an array of N dimensions, the (N-1)th index is the channel dimension.

$G$ is the number of groups along which the statistics would be computed. The number of channels must be an integer multiple of the number of groups.

Use testmode! during inference.

Example:

m = Chain(Conv((3,3), 1=>32, leakyrelu;pad = 1),
          GroupNorm(32,16)) # 32 channels, 16 groups (G = 16), thus 2 channels per group used

Link : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1803.08494.pdf

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Testmode

Many normalisation layers behave differently under training and inference (testing). By default, Flux will automatically determine when a layer evaluation is part of training or inference. Still, depending on your use case, it may be helpful to manually specify when these layers should be treated as being trained or not. For this, Flux provides testmode!. When called on a model (e.g. a layer or chain of layers), this function will place the model into the mode specified.

Flux.testmode!Function
testmode!(m, mode = true)

Set a layer or model's test mode (see below). Using :auto mode will treat any gradient computation as training.

Note: if you manually set a model into test mode, you need to manually place it back into train mode during training phase.

Possible values include:

  • false for training
  • true for testing
  • :auto or nothing for Flux to detect the mode automatically
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Flux.trainmode!Function
trainmode!(m, mode = true)

Set a layer of model's train mode (see below). Symmetric to testmode! (i.e. `trainmode!(m, mode) == testmode!(m, !mode)).

Note: if you manually set a model into train mode, you need to manually place it into test mode during testing phase.

Possible values include:

  • true for training
  • false for testing
  • :auto or nothing for Flux to detect the mode automatically
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Cost Functions

Flux.maeFunction
mae(ŷ, y)

Return the mean of absolute error sum(abs.(ŷ .- y)) / length(y)

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Flux.mseFunction
mse(ŷ, y)

Return the mean squared error sum((ŷ .- y).^2) / length(y).

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Flux.msleFunction
msle(ŷ, y; ϵ=eps(eltype(ŷ)))

Returns the mean of the squared logarithmic errors sum((log.(ŷ .+ ϵ) .- log.(y .+ ϵ)).^2) / length(y). The ϵ term provides numerical stability.

This error penalizes an under-predicted estimate greater than an over-predicted estimate.

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Flux.huber_lossFunction
huber_loss(ŷ, y; δ=1.0)

Computes the mean of the Huber loss given the prediction and true values y. By default, δ is set to 1.0.

                | 0.5*|ŷ - y|,   for |ŷ - y| <= δ
  Hubber loss = |
                |  δ*(|ŷ - y| - 0.5*δ),  otherwise

Huber Loss.

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Flux.binarycrossentropyFunction
binarycrossentropy(ŷ, y; ϵ=eps(ŷ))

Return -y*log(ŷ + ϵ) - (1-y)*log(1-ŷ + ϵ). The ϵ term provides numerical stability.

Typically, the prediction is given by the output of a sigmoid activation.

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Flux.kldivergenceFunction
kldivergence(ŷ, y)

KLDivergence is a measure of how much one probability distribution is different from the other. It is always non-negative and zero only when both the distributions are equal everywhere.

KL Divergence.

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Flux.poissonFunction
poisson(ŷ, y)

Poisson loss function is a measure of how the predicted distribution diverges from the expected distribution. Returns sum(ŷ .- y .* log.(ŷ)) / size(y, 2)

Poisson Loss.

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Flux.hingeFunction
hinge(ŷ, y)

Measures the loss given the prediction and true labels y (containing 1 or -1). Returns sum((max.(0, 1 .- ŷ .* y))) / size(y, 2)

Hinge Loss See also squared_hinge.

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Flux.squared_hingeFunction
squared_hinge(ŷ, y)

Computes squared hinge loss given the prediction and true labels y (conatining 1 or -1). Returns sum((max.(0, 1 .- ŷ .* y)).^2) / size(y, 2)

See also hinge.

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