Configuration

Experiments with NeuralMonkey are configured using configuration files which specifies the architecture of the model, meta-parameters of the learning, the data, the way the data are processed and the way the model is run.

Syntax

The configuration files are based on the syntax of INI files, see e.g., the corresponding Wikipedia page..

Neural Monkey INI files contain key-value pairs, delimited by an equal sign (=) with no spaces around. The key-value pairs are grouped into sections (Neural Monkey requires all pairs to belong to a section.)

Every section starts with its header which consists of the section name in square brackets. Everything below the header is considered a part of the section.

Comments can appear on their own (otherwise empty) line, prefixed either with a hash sign (#) or a semicolon (;) and possibly indented.

The configuration introduces several additional constructs for the values. There are both atomic values, and compound values.

Supported atomic values are:

  • booleans: literals True and False
  • integers: strings that could be interpreted as integers by Python (e.g., 1, 002)
  • floats: strings that could be interpreted as floats by Python (e.g., 1.0, .123, 2., 2.34e-12)
  • strings: string literals in quotes (e.g., "walrus", "5")
  • section references: string literals in angle brackets (e.g., <encoder>), sections are later interpreted as Python objects
  • Python names: strings without quotes which are neither booleans, integers and floats, nor section references (e.g., neuralmonkey.encoders.SentenceEncoder)

On top of that, there are two compound types syntax from Python:

  • lists: comma-separated in squared brackets (e.g., [1, 2, 3])
  • tuples: comma-separated in round brackets (e.g., ("target", <ter>))

Variables

The configuration file can contain a [vars] section, defining variables which can be used in the rest of the config file. Their values can have any of the types listed above. To reference a variable, use its name preceded by a dollar sign (e.g. $variable). Variable values can also be included inside strings using the str.format() notation. For example:

[vars]
parent_dir="experiments"
drop_keep_p=0.5
output_dir="{parent_dir}/test_drop{drop_keep_p:.2f}"
prefix="my"

[main]
output=$output_dir

...

[encoder]
name="{prefix}_encoder"
dropout_keep_prob=$drop_keep_p
...

Interpretation

Each configuration file contains a [main] section which is interpreted as a dictionary having keys specified in the section and values which are results of interpretation of the right hand sides.

Both the atomic and compound types taken from Python (i.e., everything except the section references) are interpreted as their Python counterparts. (So if you write 42, Neural Monkey actually sees 42.)

Section references are interpreted as references to objects constructed when interpreting the referenced section. (So if you write <session_manager> in a right-hand side and a section [session_manager] later in the file, Neural Monkey will construct a Python object based on the key-value pairs in the section [session_manager].)

Every section except the [main] and [vars] sections needs to contain the key class with a value of Python name which is a callable (e.g., a class constructor or a function). The other keys are used as named arguments of the callable.

Session Manager

This and following sections describes TensorFlow Manager from the users’ perspective: what can be configured in Neural Monkey with respect to TensorFlow. The configuration of the TensorFlow manager is specified within the INI file in section with class neuralmonkey.tf_manager.TensorFlowManager:

[session_manager]
class=tf_manager.TensorFlowManager
...

The session_manager configuration object is then referenced from the main section of the configuration:

[main]
tf_manager=<session_manager>
...

Training on GPU

You can easily switch between CPU and GPU version by running your experiments in virtual environment containing either CPU or GPU version of TensorFlow without any changes to config files.

Similarly, standard techniques like setting the environment variable CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES can be used to control which GPUs are accessible for Neural Monkey.

By default, Neural Monkey prefers to allocate GPU memory stepwise only as needed. This can create problems with memory fragmentation. If you know that you can allocate the whole memory at once add the following parameter the session_manager section:

gpu_allow_growth=False

You can also restrict TensorFlow to use only a fixed proportion of GPU memory:

per_process_gpu_memory_fraction=0.65

This parameter tells TensorFlow to use only 65% of GPU memory.

Training on CPUs

TensorFlow Manager settings also affect training on CPUs.

The line:

num_threads=4

indicates that 4 CPUs should be used for TensorFlow computations.