Extension library of Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit

# CNTKx

CNTKx is a deep learning library that builds on and extends Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit CNTK. Despite the last planned release of cntk 2.7, cntkx will continue to be in active development, more models and pre-built components coming soon!

Feel free to open an issue for any request or a PR to contribute :)

## Installation

cntkx is written in pure python and cntk is a dependency to it. Please get a working installation of cntk first. Then:

pip install cntkx


cntkx only works with python>=3.6

## Available Components

ops Description
floor_division element-wise floor_division
remainder element-wise remainder of division
scalar cast tensor to scalar (1,)
cumsum Cumulative summation along axis
upsample Upsample by k factor (for image)
centre_crop Crop centre of image
swish Activation
mish Activation
hardmax Activation
erf Error function
gelu Gaussian Error Linear Unit function
gelu_fast fast approximation of Gaussian Error Linear Unit function
sequence.pad Pad at start or end of sequence axis
sequence.pad_to Pad a sequence to have the same length as another sequence
sequence.length length of sequence
sequence.position position of every sequence element
sequence.stride strides across sequential axis
sequence.join joins two sequence along their sequential axis
sequence.window creates sliding window along the sequence axis
sequence.window_causal creates causal sliding window along the sequence axis
sequence.reverse reverses the items along the dynamic sequence axis
sequence.reduce_mean calculates the mean along the dynamic sequence axis
sequence.pad_ctc_labels padded ctc labels to be the same sequence length as the network output
sequence.reduce_concat_pool drop-in replace for sequence.last
random.sample Samples an unnormalised log probability distribution
random.sample_with_bias Samples an unnormalised log probability distribution over-weighted to more probable classes
random.sample_top_k Samples from the top_k of an unnormalised log probability distribution
batchmatmul Batch Matrix Multiplication on a static batch axis, similar to tf.matmul
Layers Description
QRNN Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network
Recurrence With option to apply VariationalDroppout
PyramidalBiRecurrence Pyramidal bi-directional recurrence
VariationalDropout Single binary dropout mask for entire sequence
SinusoidalPositionalEmbedding Non-learnable positional embedding (no max sequence length)
PositionalEmbedding Learnable Positional Embedding (used in BERT)
BertEmbeddings BERT Embeddings (word + token_type + positional)
BertPooler Pooler used in BERT
SpatialPyramidPooling Fixed pooled representation regardless of image input size
GatedLinearUnit Gated Convolutional Neural Network
ScaledDotProductAttention Attention used in BERT and Transformer (aka 'attention is all you need')
MultiHeadAttention Attention used in BERT and Transformer (aka 'attention is all you need')
GaussianWindowAttention Windowed attention instead of conventional attention where everything is attended at the same time
SequentialDense Applies Dense to a window of sequence item along sequence axis
SequentialMaxPooling Max pool across sequential axis and static axes
SequentialAveragePooling Average pool across sequential axis and static axes
SequentialConcatPooling Concat Average and Mean pool across sequential axis and static axes
vFSMN Vectorised Feedforward Sequential Memory Networks
cFSMN Compact Feedforward Sequential Memory Networks
BiRecurrence BiRecurrence recurrent layer with weight tying option to half parameter requirement
GlobalConcatPooling Global spatial concat pooling of ave and mean
FilterResponseNormalization Drop in replacement for batch norm with superior performance
Boom More parametrically efficient alternative to Position-Wise FeedForward layer found in Transformer
GaussianAttentionSeqImage Memory efficient attention that used 2d gaussian filters for images
SequenceDropout Dropout entire sequence elements
SEBlock Squeeze and Excitation block
SequenceSEBlock Squeeze and Excitation block for variable width image sequence
SIREN Sinusoidal Representation Network
LinearAttention Linearised form of dot-product attention with linear memory complexity
LinearAttentionModel Wrapper to LinearAttention
Blocks Description
WeightDroppedLSTM A form of regularised LSTM
IndyLSTM A parameter efficient form of LSTM
IndRNN a RNN with long memory and can be stacked deeply
Loss Description
gaussian_mdn_loss loss function when using Mixture density network
focal_loss_with_softmax A kind of cross entropy that handles extreme class imbalance
cross_entropy_with_softmax Added label smoothing regularisation in cross entropy with softmax
generalised_robust_barron_loss generalised robust loss
Models Description
VGG Image Classification
UNET Semantic Segmentation
Transformer Language Modelling
MDN Mixture Density Networks
Pre-trained models Description
Bert Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers
fwd_wt103.hdf5 The weight parameters of the fastai's pytorch model. To be used to initialise PretrainedWikitext103LanguageModel
fwd_wt103.cntk The converted cntk model of fastai's pytorch model. To be used with C.load_model
fwd_wt103.onnx The converted ONNX model of fastai's pytorch model.
Learners Description
CyclicalLearningRate a method to eliminate the need to find best value and schedule for learning rate
RAdam a variant of Adam that doesn't require any warmup
Misc Description
CTCEncoder Helper class to convert data into a format acceptable for cntk's ctc implementation

## C# CNTK Tutorials

This library is implemented in pure cntk python API. For help in cntk c#, you can refer to the two repository deep-learning-with-csharp-and-cntk and DeepBelief_Course4_Examples.

## F# CNTK

For the F# wrapper of CNTK please visit FsCNTK, it also contains some example implementations like seq2seq, autoencoder, LSTM, GAN.

## News

2021-04-04

### Added new kernel method into LinearAttention

Previous LinearAttention uses implemntation from Transformers are RNNs:Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention that uses elu. elu as kernel may not perform well in certain task (e.g. ASR) as documented in the paper.

Hence, new kernel trick uses softmax from Efficient Attention: Attention with Linear Complexities.

2020-09-06

### Added sequence.pad_ctc_labels

Pads the ctc label sequence to the same sequence length as the network output. This should be used when the final sequence length of the network output cannot be determined beforehand during the pre-processing of the ctc_labels. Thus, the padding is done during training runtime instead of during the data pipeline processing.

The padding token would be the last sequence element of ctc_labels. ctc_labels should be a one hot encoded vector sequence. The padding token will have the value of 1 in its one-hot encoded vector.

2020-06-20

### Added LinearAttention and LinearAttentionModel

Added cntk implementation of LinearAttention and LinearAttentionModel. Standard dot-product attention found in Transformer is quadratic in time and gpu memory complexity with respect to sequence length. The C.layers.AttentionModel is also quadratic.

However, LinearAttention is a linearised form of dot-product attention. It is linear in time and gpu memory complexity with respect to sequence length. This is especially significant since cntk doesn't have any checkpointing function compared to other frameworks like tensorflow and pytorch, where it saves gpu memory at the expense of some computation overhead. Now, with LinearAttention training of Transformer can be done on cntk since the gpu memory requirement is drastically reduced.

LinearAttentionModel is wrapper for LinearAttention in the style of C.layers.AttentionModel.

For more details refer to Transformers are RNNs:Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention by Katharopoulos et al.

Example:

a = C.sequence.input_variable(24)
b = LinearAttention(hidden_dim=32, model_dim=24)(a, a, a)

assert b.shape == (32, )


2020-06-20

### Added sequence.pad_to

sequence.pad_to pads a shorter sequence to the same sequence length as another longer sequence. This is especially useful in CTC training where both sequences need to have the same sequence length

Example:

ax1 = C.Axis.new_unique_dynamic_axis('ax1')
ax2 = C.Axis.new_unique_dynamic_axis('ax2')
a = C.sequence.input_variable(3, sequence_axis=ax1)
b = C.sequence.input_variable(6, sequence_axis=ax2)

ctc_token = C.Constant(np.array([0, 0, 1]))
d = C.element_select(C.equal(c, 0), ctc_token, c)  # swap padded zeros with ctc token


2020-06-19

### Added SIREN

SIREN leverages periodic activation functions for implicit neural representations and demonstrate that these networks are ideally suited for representing complex natural signals and their derivatives.

The results are incredible. It is highly recommended that you check out their project page.

More details can be found in their paper Implicit Neural Representations with PeriodicActivation Functions

2020-05-01

### Added SEBlock and SequenceSEBlock

SEBlock and SequenceSEBlock are squeeze-excitation blocks that adaptively recalibrates channel-wise feature responses by explicitly modelling interdependencies between channels. It was show that these blocks can be stacked together to form SENet architectures that generalise extremely effectively across different datasets.

Its the winner for ILSVRC2017 classification submission. More details can be found in the paper Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks by Jie hu et al.

2020-04-20

### Added SequenceDropout

SequenceDropout dropouts entire sequence elements along the dynamic sequence axis.

2020-04-15

### Added GaussianAttentionSeqImage

GaussianAttentionSeqImage is a 2d spatial gaussian attention. To use, the encoded image should be formulated as a cntk sequence (example below). This can be useful when you are constraint by gpu memory as 2d gaussian attention is more memory efficient than standard attention.

This is from the deepmind paper, DRAW: A Recurrent Neural Network for Image Generation by Gregor et al More details can be found in the following https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.04623

Example:

n = 5
num_channels = 3
image_height = 64
expected_image_width = 1000
image_seq = C.sequence.input_variable((num_channels, image_height))  # rgb image with variable width and fixed height
decoder_hidden_state = ...  # from decoder somewhere in the network
attended_image = Cx.layers.GaussianAttentionSeqImage(n, image_height, expected_image_width)(image_seq, decoder_hidden_state)

assert attended_image.shape == (num_channels, n, n)


2020-03-29.

#### Added generalised_robust_barron_loss and sample_with_bias

generalised_robust_barron_loss is a generalisation for generalization of the Cauchy/Lorentzian, Geman-McClure, Welsch/Leclerc, generalized Charbonnier, Charbonnier/pseudo-Huber/L1-L2, and L2 loss functions.

Can be used as a drop-in replacement in any regression task that you have.

For more details, please refer to A General and Adaptive Robust Loss Function, Jonathan T. Barron, or this video. It is the Best Paper Award Finalist in CVPR 2019.

Implemented sample_with_bias to sample more likely classes as a replacement for sample_top_k which cannot be used inside a UnfoldFrom. sample_with_bias reduces sampling variance especially when you have a long tail.

2020-02-11.

#### Added Boom

Boom layer from SHA-RNN by S. Merity creator of QRNN. Alternative to PositionwiseFeedForward. Serves the same function as PositionwiseFeedForward found in transformer.

Boom layer minimizes computation and removes an entire matrix of parameters compared to traditional down-projection layers.

2019-12-03.

#### Added FilterResponseNormalization and ThresholdedLinearUnit

Added cntk implementation of FilterResponseNormalization. Filter Response Normalization (FRN) layer is a novel combination of a normalization and an activation function, that can be used as a drop-in replacement for other normalizations and activations.

The method operates on each activation map of each batch sample independently, eliminating the dependency on other batch samples or channels of the same sample. The method outperforms BN and all alternatives in a variety of settings for all batch sizes. FRN layer performs â‰ˆ0.7âˆ’1.0% better on top-1 validation accuracy than BN with large mini-batch sizes on Imagenet classification on InceptionV3 and ResnetV2-50 architectures. Further, it performs >1% better than GN on the same problem in the small mini-batch size regime. For object detection problem on COCO dataset, FRN layer outperforms all other methods by at least 0.3âˆ’0.5% in all batch size regimes.

Please refer to the paper Filter Response Normalization Layer: Eliminating Batch Dependence in the Training of Deep Neural Networks for more details .

2019-11-04.

#### Added ops.floor_division, ops.remainder, sequence.window_causal and SequentialDense

Add in new operations stated above. sequence.window now has an additional argument that lets you control striding. sequence.window_causal creates causal window that doesn't leak future information into the past (preserve causality). SequentialDense convenience layer added to apply dense to a window of sequence item, much like SequentialConvolution but with better memory performance.

2019-11-04.

#### Added SequentialConcatPooling, Cx.Sequence.reduce_concat_pool and GlobalConcatPooling

Cx.Sequence.reduce_concat_pool concatenates the last item in the sequence axis with the summarisation of the sequence represented by reduce_max and reduce_mean of the sequence axis. Anytime C.sequence.last is used, this can be a drop-in replacement.

Example:

n = 32
a = C.sequence.input_variable(n)
b = Cx.sequence.reduce_concat_pool(a)

assert b.shape == (n * 3, )


SequentialConcatPooling does spatial concat pooling over the sequential axis. Concat pooling is the concatenation of both average pooling and max pooling. In any situation where max or ave pooling is appropriate, concat pooling can be used as a drop-in replacement and achieve improvements in performance.

Example:

a = C.sequence.input_variable((3, 10))
b = SequentialConcatPooling(filter_shape=(2, 2), strides=2)(a)

assert b.shape == (6, 10)

n = [np.random.random((3, 10)).astype(np.float32),
np.random.random((3, 10)).astype(np.float32),
np.random.random((3, 10)).astype(np.float32),
np.random.random((3, 10)).astype(np.float32), ]

print(b.eval({a: n}))


GlobalConcatPooling is the standard spatial concat pooling of both max pool and ave pool.

2019-10-15.

#### Added mish activation function and RAdam learner.

mish is an activation function is introduced in Mish: A Self Regularized Non-Monotonic Neural Activation Function by Diganta Misra. Experiments show that mish tends to work better than both ReLU and Swish along with other standard activation functions in many deep networks across challenging datasets. For instance, in Squeeze Excite Net-18 for CIFAR 100 classification, the network with Mish had an increase in Top-1 test accuracy by 0.494% and 1.671% as compared to the same network with Swish and ReLU respectively. The similarity to Swish along with providing a boost in performance and its simplicity in implementation makes it easier for researchers and developers to use Mish in their Neural Network Models.

This activation function is adopted in fast ai.

Rectified Adam or RAdam is a Adam optimiser variant that doesn't require a warmup schedule, which Adam tends to need to maintain stability. In this cntk implementation, we added a RAdam like optimiser based on the work of On the adequacy of untuned warmup for adaptive optimization by Jerry Ma and Denis Yarats.

RAdam is adopted in fast ai too.

2019-09-30.

#### Added BiRecurrence with weight tying

Made improvement to weight tying of BiRecurrence by have one parameter tensor token for every state in the step function per direction (forward and backward). This will allow forward and backward token to have more representational flexibility. Previously, all states use the same forward or backward token.

2019-09-06.

#### Added BiRecurrence with weight tying

Add a wrapper to create a bidirectional recurrent layer using BiRecurrence. Included in the implementation is an option to half the number of parameters required by bidirectional recurrent layer. This is done by only using one recurrent unit to do both forward and backward computation instead of the usual two. A forward and backward token is used to initialise the hidden state so that the recurrent unit can tell the directionality.

More details can be found in the paper Efficient Bidirectional Neural Machine Translation

Example:

a = C.sequence.input_variable(10)
b = BiRecurrence(LSTM(100), weight_tie=True)(a)

assert b.shape == (200, )


2019-08-29.

#### Added PretrainedWikitext103LanguageModel

CNTK implementation of Fast AI's Universal Language ModelFine-tuning (ULMFiT) English model has been added. This language model was trained on Wikitext-103 and can be used as a base model for any downstream language task.

It is also much more efficient to run compare to BERT and other Transformer language models.

For more details, you can refer to the original paper here

Example:

vocab_size = 238462
converted_hdf5_model_file_path = 'PATH/fwd_wt103.hdf5'  # this is not the original pytorch model
lm = PretrainedWikitext103LanguageModel(converted_hdf5_model_file_path)

a = C.sequence.input_variable(vocab_size)
prediction = lm(a)  # next-word-prediction
features = prediction.features  # features of tokens

assert prediction.shape == (vocab_size, )
assert features.shape == (400, )

Model Description
fwd_wt103.hdf5 The weight parameters of the fastai's pytorch model. To be used to initialise PretrainedWikitext103LanguageModel
fwd_wt103.cntk The converted cntk model of fastai's pytorch model. To be used with C.load_model
fwd_wt103.onnx The converted ONNX model of fastai's pytorch model.
itos_wt103.pkl Tokens used in pretrained model

2019-08-08.

#### Added cntkx.ops.gelu and cntkx.ops.gelu_fast

Added two cntk implementation of gelu activation function. gelu activation is used in BERT and OpenAI's GPT and GPT-2.

Gaussian Error Linear Unit (GELU), a high-performing neuralnetwork activation function. The GELU nonlinearity is the expected transforma-tion of a stochastic regularizer which randomly applies the identity or zero mapto a neuronâ€™s input. The GELU nonlinearity weights inputs by their magnitude,rather than gates inputs by their sign as in ReLUs.

For more detail please refer to Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELU) by Hendrycks and Gimpel.

2019-07-04.

#### Added cntkx.ops.sequence.reduce_mean

Calculates the mean along the dynamic sequential axis in CNTK.

2019-06-26.

#### Added cntkx.ops.sequence.reverse

Allows the sequence items along the sequence axis to be reversed. This is useful when you want to create a Bi-directional Auto-Regressive layer because using UnfoldFrom does not work with Recurrence(go_backwards=True) and will result in a ValueError.

Example:

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx
from cntk.layers import Recurrence, UnfoldFrom, LSTM

hidden_dim = 50
start_token = C.Constant(0, shape=(hidden_dim,))
a = C.sequence.input_variable(1, name='seq1')

b = UnfoldFrom(Recurrence(LSTM(hidden_dim), go_backwards=True))(start_token, a)

n = [np.random.random((10, hidden_dim)).astype(np.float32),]

# This raise 'ValueError: It is not allowed to have multiple different stepping directions in the same loop'
b.eval({b.arguments[0]: n})


The workaround would be:

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx
from cntk.layers import Recurrence, UnfoldFrom, LSTM

hidden_dim = 50
start_token = C.Constant(0, shape=(hidden_dim,))
a = C.sequence.input_variable(1, name='seq1')
a_reversed = Cx.sequence.reverse(a)

b = UnfoldFrom(Recurrence(LSTM(hidden_dim)))(start_token, a_reversed)  # remove go_backwards=True

n = [np.random.random((10, hidden_dim)).astype(np.float32),]
b.eval({b.arguments[0]: n})  # this will run just fine


2019-06-21.

#### Added cntkx.ops.random.sample_top_k

CNTK implementation of that allows sampling of the top_k unnormalised log-probabilities distribution. This is useful text (or sequence) generation where it is known that greedy decoding will cause text degeneration.

For more details on this, please refer to A curious case of neural text degeneration

Example:

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

a = C.input_variable(5)
b = Cx.random.sample_top_k(a, k=3, num_classes=5)

n = np.array([[1, 2, 3, 4, 5],] * 1000)

results = b.eval({a: n})
assert np.sum(results[:, :2]) == 0
assert np.sum(results[:, 2:]) == 1000


2019-05-04.

#### Added cntkx.layers.vFSMN and cntkx.layers.cFSMN

CNTK implementation of Bidirectional vectorised Feedforward Sequential Memory Network (vFSMN) and Compact Feedforward Sequential Memory Network (cFSMN).

FSMN is a standard fully-connected feedforward neural network equipped with some learnable memory blocks in its hidden layers. The memory blocks use a tapped-delay line structure to encode the long context information into a fixed-size representation as short-term memory mechanism.

The authors claim that FSMNs can be learned much more reliably and faster than RNNs or LSTMs due to the inherent non-recurrent model structure while significantly outperforming RNNs in language and speech modeling.

For more details please refer to Feedforward Sequential Memory Networks: A New Structure to Learn Long-term Dependency

cFSMN is a compact version of FSMN that can result in a reduction of up to 60% in model size and speed up the learning by more than 7 times while still significantly outperforming the popular bi-direction LSTMs for both frame-level cross-entropy (CE) criterion based training and MMI based sequence training.

For more details please refer to "Compact Feedforward Sequential Memory Networks for Large VocabularyContinuous Speech Recognition" by Zhang, et al.

Example:

import cntk as C
from cntkx.layers import vFSMN, cFSMN

# unidirectional vFSMN (only past conext used)
a = C.sequence.input_variable(10)
b = vFSMN(100, C.relu, num_past_context=3, num_future_context=0)(a)

assert b.shape == (100,)

# bidirectional vFSMN (enable both past and future context)
a = C.sequence.input_variable(10)
b = vFSMN(120, C.relu, num_past_context=3, num_future_context=3)(a)

assert b.shape == (120,)

# bidirectional cFSMN (enable both past and future context)
a = C.sequence.input_variable(100)
b = cFSMN(120, 50, C.relu, num_past_context=3, num_future_context=3)(a)

assert b.shape == (120,)


2019-04-19.

#### Added cntkx.misc.CTCEncoder

CNTK's CTC implementation requires that data be formatted in a particular way that's typically in acoustic modeling but unusual in other applications. So class provides an easy way to convert data between what users typically expect and what cntk demands.

Example: labels = ['a', 'b', 'c'] encoder = CTCEncoder(labels)

labels_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(len(encoder.classes_))  # number of classes = 4
input_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(100)

labels_graph = cntk.labels_to_graph(labels_tensor)
network_out = model(input_tensor)

fb = C.forward_backward(labels_graph, network_out, blankTokenId=encoder.blankTokenId)

ground_truth = ['a', 'b', 'b', 'b', 'c']
seq_length = 10  # must be the same length as the sequence length in network_out

fb.eval({input_tensor: [...],
labels_tensor: [encoder.transform(ground_truth, seq_length=seq_length)]})


2019-04-14.

#### Added Label Smoothing Regularization, seqeuence.window and PyramidalBiRecurrence

Added Label Smoothing Regularization in cross_entropy_with_softmax. Added sequence.window that creates non-overlapping window along the sequence axis thereby reducing the sequence length and increasing the dimension by the same factor.

Implemented a convenience layer used in acoustic modelling known as PyramidalBiRecurrence. Used to create pyramidal bi-directional LSTM (BLSTM) found in "Listen, attend and spell" by Chan et al. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1508.01211) Typically used to down sample the sequence length to make memory and runtime manageable.

2019-04-08.

#### Added cntkx.ops.sequence.join

Added a new op called join where two sequence tensors can be joined along with sequence axis forming a longer sequence.

2019-04-08.

#### Added cntkx.layers.SequentialAveragePooling

Add average pooling layer that works with sequential axis. Current cntk AveragePooling doesn't pool across sequence elements.

Example on cntkx.layers.SequentialAveragePooling

# rgb image of height 25 and variable width
a = C.sequence.input_variable((3, 25))

# Convolute across image with (3, 3) kernel with stride (1, 1)
b = C.layers.SequentialConvolution(filter_shape=(3, 3), num_filters=16, stride=(1, 1), pad=True)(a)

assert b.shape == (16, 25)

# max pool (2,2) in height and width with stride (2,2) in height and width, no padding
c = SequentialAveragePooling(filter_shape=(2, 2), strides=(2, 2), pad=False)(b)

assert c.shape == (16, 12)


2019-04-07.

#### Added cntkx.sequence.stride and cntkx.ops.scalar

Cx.sequence.stride enables striding across the sequential axis, selecting every integer items along the sequence. Cx.scalar converts tensor into scalar of shape (1,)

2019-04-06.

#### Added IndyLSTM and IndRNN

CNTK implementation of Independently Recurrent Long Short-term Memory cells: IndyLSTMs by Gonnet and Deselaers, and Independently Recurrent Neural Network (IndRNN): Building A Longer andDeeper RNN by Li, et al.

Both IndyLSTM and IndRNN have hidden-to-hidden weights that are diagonal matrix instead of the usual full matrix. Thus neurons in each layer are independent from each other, and the cross-channel information is obtained through stacking multiple layers.

IndRNN allows for the use of C.relu activation thus allowing multiple IndRNN layers to be stacked together deeply.

IndyLSTM has parameters linear to the number of nodes in the linear, as opposed to standard LSTM that is quadratic making IndyLSTM potentially faster and smaller as a model.

Authors of both IndRNN and IndyLSTM have claimed performance as good as or even better than regular LSTMs.

Example:

import cntk as C
from cntkx.layers import IndyLSTM, IndRNN, Recurrence

a = C.sequence.input_variable(10)
b = Recurrence(IndRNN(20))(a)
c = Recurrence(IndyLSTM(20))(a)

assert b.shape == c.shape == (20,)


2019-03-24.

#### Added cntkx.layers.SequentialMaxPooling

Add max pooling layer that works with sequential axis. Current cntk MaxPooling doesn't pool across sequence elements.

Example on cntkx.layers.SequentialMaxPooling

# rgb image of height 25 and variable width
a = C.sequence.input_variable((3, 25))

# Convolute across image with (3, 3) kernel with stride (1, 1)
b = C.layers.SequentialConvolution(filter_shape=(3, 3), num_filters=16, stride=(1, 1), pad=True)(a)

assert b.shape == (16, 25)

# max pool (2,2) in height and width with stride (2,2) in height and width, no padding
c = SequentialMaxPooling(filter_shape=(2, 2), strides=(2, 2), pad=False)(b)

assert c.shape == (16, 12)


2019-03-18.

#### Added cntkx.learners.CyclicalLearningRate

Cyclical learning rate (CLR) is an implementation to that practically eliminates the need to experimentally find the best values and schedule for the global learning rates.

Instead of monotonically decreasing the learning rate, this method lets the learning
rate cyclically vary between reasonable boundary values. Training with
cyclical learning rates instead of fixed values achieves improved classification accuracy without a need to tune and often in fewer iterations.

More details can be found in Cyclical Learning Rates for Training Neural Networks by Leslie N. Smith

This CLR implementation can be used with the cntk training loop by adding only two lines of code:

model = C.layers.Dense(10)(C.input_variable(10))
sgd_momentum = C.momentum_sgd(model.parameters, 0.1, 0.9)
clr = CyclicalLeaningRate(sgd_momentum, minibatch_size=32)  # first line of code

for epoch in range(10):
for batch in range(100):
trainer.train_minibatch(...)
clr.batch_step()  # second line of code (to be called after every training update)


2019-03-12.

#### Added cntkx.ops.batchmatmul

Added Batch Matrix Multiplication. This implementation is similar to tensorflow.matmul.

Example:

a = C.sequence.input_variable((3, 4, 5))     # batch matrix
b = C.sequence.input_variable((3, 5, 6))     # batch matrix
c = Cx.batchmatmul(a, b)
assert c.shape == (3, 4, 6)                  # 3 is treated as a batch axis


2019-03-10.

#### Added PretrainedBertEncoder and PretrainedBertModel

BERT, the state-of-the-art language model is now available as a CNTK pretrained model.

Currently, it is only tested to work with BERT-Base, Uncased (uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12) and can be downloaded from Google AI

When you have downloaded BERT-Base, Uncased, there should be 5 files inside. You will need to .zip three of those files into a tensorflow checkpoint file before you can load it into cntkx.

Those three files are: bert_model.ckpt.data-00000-of-00001, bert_model.ckpt.index, bert_model.ckpt.meta. Then rename the extension of .zip into .ckpt and you are good to go.

Example below

text_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(30522)
token_type_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(2)
filepath_to_tf_bert_model = "YOUR_FILE_DIRECTORY/bert_model.ckpt"

b = model(text_tensor, token_type_tensor)

assert b.shape == (768,)


For more details about BERT, you can find the original paper here, and some useful resources here and here.

Note: It goes without saying also that to use these pre-trained models you will need to have tensorflow installed since we are convert them from tensorflow models.

2019-03-06.

#### Added PositionalEmbedding, BertEmbeddings and PretrainedBertEmbeddings

CNTK implementation of PositionalEmbedding, BertEmbeddings and tf-to-cntk PreTrainedBertEmbeddings. BERT is a state-of-the-art language model from Google AI, more details can be found in BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.

Google AI's pre-trained BERT tensorflow model can be downloaded here. Tensorflow would need to be installed in your environment if you intend to use PreTrainedBertEmbeddings, which takes a tensorflow model and convert it cntk.

Example for PositionalEmbedding

a = C.sequence.input_variable(12)
b = PositionalEmbedding(max_seq_length, hidden_dim)(a)

assert b.shape == (hidden_dim, )


Example for BertEmbeddings

text_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(100)
token_type_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(2)
b = BertEmbeddings(max_seq_length, hidden_dim, 0.1)(text_tensor, token_type_tensor)

assert b.shape == (hidden_dim, )


Example for PreTrainedBertEmbeddings

text_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(30522)
token_type_tensor = C.sequence.input_variable(2)
filepath_to_tf_bert_model = "YOURFILEPATH"
embeddings = PreTrainedBertEmbeddings(filepath_to_tf_bert_model, 0.1, False)
b = embeddings(text_tensor, token_type_tensor)

assert b.shape == (768, )


2019-03-02.

#### Added VariationalDropout and WeightDroppedLSTM

CNTK implementation of Variational Dropout found in A Theoretically Grounded Application of Dropout in Recurrent Neural Networks and Weight Dropped LSTM proposed in a salesforce research paper Regularizing and Optimizing LSTM Language Models.

Weight Dropped LSTM is a regularised LSTM that uses DropConnect on hidden-to-hidden weights as a form of recurrent regularisation. It also include application of variational dropout on the inputs and outputs of the recurrent units for further regularisation.

Variational Drpoout is a regularisation that uses same dropout mask at each time step (i.e. across the dynamic sequence axis) as opposed to the naive application of C.layers.Dropout to a sequence which will result in a different dropout mask for every tensor along the sequence axis.

import cntkx as Cx
from cntkx.layers import Recurrence, WeightDroppedLSTM
import cntk as C

dropconnect_rate = 0.2
variationaldrop_rate = 0.1

seq = C.sequence.input_variable(56)
b = Recurrence(WeightDroppedLSTM(20, dropconnect_rate),
variational_dropout_rate_input=variationaldrop_rate,
variational_dropout_rate_output=variationaldrop_rate)(seq)

assert b.shape == (100, )

seq_dropped = VariationalDropout(0.1)(seq)

assert seq_dropped.shape == seq.shape


2019-02-02.

#### Added Gated Linear Unit / Gated CNN

CNTK implementation of Gated Linear Unit (Gated CNN) founnd in Facebook AI Research Lab's paper: Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks. This paper applies a convolutional approach to language modelling with a novel Gated-CNN model.

import cntkx as Cx
import cntk as C

seq = C.sequence.input_variable(56)
hidden = Cx.layers.GatedLinearUnit(window=2, hidden_dim=100)(seq)

assert hidden.shape == (100, )


2019-01-21.

#### Added Focal Loss for multi-class and binary classification

CNTK implementation of Focal Loss enables the training of highly accurate dense object detectors in the presence of vast numbers of easy background examples or dataset with extreme class imbalance (e.g. 1:1000).

Focal Loss focuses training on a sparse set of hard examples and prevents the vast number of easy negatives from overwhelm-ing the model during training.

For more details please refer to Focal Loss for Dense Object Detection

import cntkx as Cx

Cx.focal_loss_with_softmax([[0, 0, 0.8, 0.2]], [[0, 0, 1, 0]]).eval()
array([[0.31306446]], dtype=float32)


2019-01-18.

#### Added Gaussian Window Attention Model

Gaussian window attention model was first introduced by Alex Graves in "Generating sequences with recurrent neural networks".

It uses a mixture of gaussian windows to attend to portions of the sequence as oppose to the widely used attention model introduced in "Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate" by Bahdanau, et al. that attends to the entire sequence all at once.

Gaussian window attention is also directional in its attention on the context sequence. When modeling strongly ordered sequences, gaussian window attention will be a natural choice due to this inductive bias.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

seq1 = C.Axis.new_unique_dynamic_axis('seq1')
seq2 = C.Axis.new_unique_dynamic_axis('seq2')

encoded = C.sequence.input_variable(30, sequence_axis=seq1)
query = C.sequence.input_variable(28, sequence_axis=seq2)

a = Cx.layers.GaussianWindowAttention(10)(encoded, query)

assert a.shape == (30, )


"Generating sequences with recurrent neural networks" can be found here. "Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate" can be found here.

2019-01-16.

#### Added Spatial Pyramid Pooling layer

Spatial pyramid pooling layer is a pooling layer than returns a fixed length representation regardless of the image size/scale. It is frequently used for multi-size image training. It reported SOTA classification results using a single full-image representation without fine-tuning. For more details on the paper "Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition" by K. He, X. Zhang, S. Ren, J. Sun, link here.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

n = np.random.random((3, 3, 32, 32)).astype(np.float32)
a = C.input_variable((3, 32, 32))
b = Cx.layers.SpatialPyramidPooling((1, 2, 4))(a)

assert b.shape == (3 * (4 * 4 + 2 * 2 + 1),)  # representation not dependent on image size


2019-01-15.

#### Added Sinusoidal Positional Embedding and cntkx.ops.erf

Added sinusoidal positional embedding used in Transformer. For an accessible explanation of transformer, you may look up here.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

a = C.sequence.input_variable(10)
b = SinusoidalPositionalEmbedding()(a)

assert b.shape == (10, )


Added cntkx.ops.erf error function.

2019-01-12.

#### Added Vision models: VGG16, VGG19 and UNET

VGG is for image classification and UNET is for semantic segmentation. VGG is implemented for completeness sake and should not be used for any serious classification task.

Paper on VGG can be found here titled "Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition"

Paper for UNET can be found here titled "U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation"

VGG example:

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

a = C.input_variable((3, 64, 64))
b = Cx.layers.VGG19(100)(a)

assert b.shape == (100,)


UNET example:

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

a = C.input_variable((3, 512, 512))

assert b.shape == (10, 512, 512)


Convenience functions such as cntkx.ops.upsample and centre_crop have also been added. cntkx.ops.upsample upsamples an image twice on each spatial dim. centre_crop crops a smaller image from a bigger one in the centre given a reference smaller image.

#### Added Transformer attention model and associated components

The Transformer was first introduced in the paper 'Attention is all you need'. The architecture is based solely on attention mechanisms, dispensing with recurrence and convolutions entirely. More recently, BERT which broke almost all SOTA language task is also based on transformer and self-attention.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

a = C.sequence.input_variable(512)
b = C.sequence.input_variable(512)

transformer = Cx.layers.Transformer()  # using default settings
decoded = transformer(a, b)

assert decoded.shape == (512, )


2018-12-08.

#### Added QRNN: Quasi-Recurrent Neural Network (QRNN) and cntkx.ops.cumsum

The QRNN provides similar accuracy to the LSTM but can be betwen 2 and 17 times faster than the highly optimized NVIDIA cuDNN LSTM implementation depending on the use case.

More details please refer to the original paper here.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

input_seq = C.sequence.input_variable(input_dim)
prediction_seq = Cx.layers.QRNN(hidden_dim=50)(input_seq)


2018-12-07.

#### New sequence ops: cntkx.ops.sequence.pad and cntkx.ops.sequence.length

Added two new sequence ops. cntkx.ops.sequence.pad allows padding on the sequence axis and cntkx.ops.sequence.length calculates the length of the sequence.

2018-12-05.

#### Mixture Density Network

Mixture density networks are neural networks that can in principle represent arbitrary conditional probability distributions in the same way that a conventional neural network can represent arbitrary functions. MDN are very useful when you need to map an input to several correct targets (aka. one-to-many problem).

Updated with Gaussian Mixture Density Network ops and loss function. Ops will allow you to extract mdn coefficients and sample from the network.

More details on mdn can be found in this paper by Christopher Bishop.

import cntk as C
import cntkx as Cx

input_tensor = C.input_variable(1, name="input_tensor")
target_tensor = C.input_variable(1, name="target_tensor")

# model
inner = Dense(50, activation=C.relu)(input_tensor)
inner = Dense(50, activation=C.relu)(inner)
prediction_tensor = Dense((ndim + 2) * nmix, activation=None)(inner)

sampled = Cx.sample_gaussian_mdn(prediction_tensor, nmix, ndim)  # sampling node
loss = Cx.gaussian_mdn_loss(prediction_tensor, target_tensor, nmix=nmix, ndim=ndim)  # loss function


## Project details

Uploaded source
Uploaded py3