# How to extract features of an image from a trained model

That looks like it’ll do the trick.

Is there a convenient way to fetch the intermediate values when the forward behavior is defined by nn.Sequential()? It seems like right now the only way to compose multiple responses would be to split off all the individual layers and forward the values manually in forward().

Essentially what I want to do is take an existing network (e.g. VGG) and just pick some responses of some layers (conv1_1, pool1, pool2, etc.) and concatenate them into a feature vector.

7 Likes

You could write your own sequential version that keeps track of all intermediate results in a list. Something like

class SelectiveSequential(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, to_select, modules_dict):
super(SelectiveSequential, self).__init__()
for key, module in modules_dict.items():
self._to_select = to_select

def forward(x):
list = []
for name, module in self._modules.iteritems():
x = module(x)
if name in self._to_select:
list.append(x)
return list


And then you could use it like

class Net(nn.Module):
def __init__(self):
super(Net, self).__init__()
self.features = SelectiveSequential(
['conv1', 'conv3'],
{'conv1': nn.Conv2d(1, 1, 3),
'conv2': nn.Conv2d(1, 1, 3),
'conv3': nn.Conv2d(1, 1, 3)}
)

def forward(self, x):
return self.features(x)

31 Likes

@kpar, another way to extract features layer by layer of a pre-existing neural network is to recreate a new network, adding one by one all the layers from the pre-trained network, plus some “transparent layers” that just extract features:

net = models.alexnet(pretrained=True).features

class Feature_extractor(nn.module):
def forward(self, input):
self.feature = input.clone()
return input

new_net = nn.Sequential().cuda() # the new network

target_layers = [conv_1, conv_2, conv_4] # layers you want to extract

i = 1
for layer in list(cnn):
if isinstance(layer,nn.Conv2d):
name = "conv_"+str(i)

if name in target_layers:

i+=1

if isinstance(layer,nn.ReLU):
name = "relu_"+str(i)

if isinstance(layer,nn.MaxPool2d):
name = "pool_"+str(i)

new_net.forward(your_image)
print new_net.extractor_3.feature
1 Like

@alexis-jacq I wouldn’t recommend that. It’s better to keep your models stateless i.e. not hold any of the intermediate states. Otherwise, if you don’t pay enough attention to them, you might end up with problems when you’ll have references to the graphs you don’t need, and they will be only taking up memory.

If you really want to do something like that, I’d recommend this:

class FeatureExtractor(nn.Module):
def __init__(self, submodule, extracted_layers):
self.submodule = submodule

def forward(self, x):
outputs = []
for name, module in self.submodule._modules.items():
x = module(x)
if name in self.extracted_layers:
outputs += [x]
return outputs + [x]


This unfortunately uses a private member _modules, but I don’t expect it to change in the near future, and we’ll probably expose an API for iterating over modules with names soon.

18 Likes

Wow! good to know that… Thanks!

That would be really useful!

1 Like

Hmm… all is well for simple networks, like AlexNet.
What if I want to use something a bit more fancy, say ResNet-18, and wish to extract some intermediate representation?
I can fetch the model with torchvision.models.resnet18(pretrained=True). I think the network graph can be reconstructed by forwarding a Variable and checking who’s the parent, but I wouldn’t be sure about how to do this not by hand.
Moreover I think the tuple attribute classes (mapping output class to label) is missing.

Can I register a hook to a specific child, and have it return its current output? In the old Torch I would have model:get(myModuleIndex).output, or a more nested combination, and got myModuleIndex from visual inspection of the model structure (using the __tostring() metamethod).

How do we hack these models?

OK, I’ve managed to display the graph with from visualize import make_dot (here’s visualize).
Now how can I reach inside the graph?

So, let’s call the output h_x (which is $h_\theta(x)$).
So, I can peek at my embedding if I do the following dirty sequence of operations (which I guess are not recommended).

x = Variable(torch.rand(1, 3, 224, 224))
h_x = resnet_18.forward(x)
last_view = h_x.creator.previous_functions[0][0]
last_pool = last_view.previous_functions[0][0]
embedding = last_pool.saved_tensors[0]


And embedding should correspond to the output of the last Threshold, if I’m not mistaken. Still, this is not generally applicable to every functional block, since not all block cache the input.
So, I’m still after a better way to dissect these nets…

1 Like

Why do you want to inspect the graph? A new instance is going to be created at every forward.

You can register a hook on any Variable using the register_hook method, or on any module - register_backward_hook.

What are you trying to do, and why doesn’t the FeatureExtractor I shown above work for that?

1 Like

Hmm, I thought that the FeatureExtractor you showed above can deal only with sequential models.
The loop

for name, module in self.submodule._modules.items():
x = module(x)


passes forward the output of each submodule's module, in a sequential manner, no?
Maybe I don’t understand what the method _modules() provides…

Yeah it does, but you can easily adapt it to other network topologies by replacing self.submodule with some other reference. resnet18 is sequential if you only want to inspect the maps between the blocks.

I think @Atcold meant that FeatureExtractor only works for networks with submodules that are the layers. The problem is not solved for networks with “sub-sub-modules” like in resnet18 structure, maybe somewhere we need a recursive pass, in order to access the “leaf-modules” of the graph…

2 Likes

Thank you @alexis-jacq for addressing my specific issue.
I’ve been suggested to use nn.Module.register_forward_hook() to perform this job.
I still have to figure out a smart way to get the reference to specific nn.Modules within a graph, but I think I can play with the visualisation script I posted above.

@albanD, this is why I think the graph integration with your TensorBoard client is essential.
So that I can click around and add some hooks on the fly.

@Atcold The issue with adding graph integration to Crayon is that we need to essentially write an interface between whatever TensorBoard reads and PyTorch (or Torch, Theano, CNTK, etc.).

We managed to quickly write what we currently have because getting TensorBoard to take 2d values / histograms was relatively straightforward, however adding integration for more complex data types is not a one-day job.

After the ICML deadline we’ll give it a look.

1 Like

@atcold As I said, there is absolutely no need to inspect the graph for your purposes. It’s possible that you won’t find most of the intermediate values, because they’re not needed and have been already freed, and we don’t guarantee any stability w.r.t. adding hooks to the internal graph objects or the internal data structures for now. There’s a lot of work going around autograd and we can’t be limited in what we can change. If anyone wants to develop some kind of helpers like TensorBoard integradion or serialization, let us know and we’ll keep you posted. Otherwise, it’s a bad idea to depend on that.

Forward hooks are a good idea. Feature extractor could be easily adapted to recursively list all submodules with their names (see e.g. the implementation of state_dict()). We’ll be adding such method to nn soon.

6 Likes

OK, it starts to make sense.
I’ll post here some notes, for future reference (there is also a notebook, here).

One thing I’ve figured out, by inspecting the network graph, is that it is made of Variables (or Parameters, which are technically Variables too) and _functions.

Given that h_x = resnet_18(x), I have that h_x.creator is a torch.nn._functions.linear.Linear object, which previous_functions is a tuple of len 3, containing

1. a torch.autograd._functions.tensor.View object,
2. a weight matrix of size (1000, 512)
3. a bias vector of size (1000)

Some of these _functions object have cached values (as long as volatile is False for the input Variable), but one cannot rely on them.

On the other side, by typing print(resnet_18), one can visualise the network’s Modules’ name and respective repr. (The output is quite lengthy, so I will avoid copying it here.)
Some of these Modules have other Modules inside, and the repr makes sure to unroll them out, in insertion order (meaning, when they have been assigned to the respective self super-object) and may not reflect the order with which they have been used, in the forward() method.

Now, let’s have a look for ResNet-18.

>>> resnet_18._modules.keys()
odict_keys(['conv1', 'bn1', 'relu', 'maxpool', 'layer1', 'layer2', 'layer3', 'layer4', 'avgpool', 'fc'])


We can now register a forward hook to avgpool, and have it return its output Variable.
Let’s check first what this hook gets as parameters.

avgpool_layer = resnet_18._modules.get('avgpool')
h = avgpool_layer.register_forward_hook(
lambda m, i, o: \
print(
'm:', type(m),
'\ni:', type(i),
'\n   len:', len(i),
'\n   type:', type(i[0]),
'\n   data size:', i[0].data.size(),
'\n   data type:', i[0].data.type(),
'\no:', type(o),
'\n   data size:', o.data.size(),
'\n   data type:', o.data.type(),
)
)
h_x = resnet_18(x)
h.remove()


gives us

m: <class 'torch.nn.modules.pooling.AvgPool2d'>
i: <class 'tuple'>
len: 1
data size: torch.Size([1, 512, 7, 7])
data type: torch.FloatTensor
data size: torch.Size([1, 512, 1, 1])
data type: torch.FloatTensor


Sweet. We can now create a Tensor of size 512 and copy over the embedding.

my_embedding = torch.zeros(512)
def fun(m, i, o): my_embedding.copy_(o.data)
h = avgpool_layer.register_forward_hook(fun)
h_x = resnet_18(x)
h.remove()


Now the Tensor my_embedding will contain what we were looking for.

The only point for which I am still not that confident, is the connection between a torch.autograd._functions.something.Something object and the Module that did create it. Right now I’m just guessing the paternity.

12 Likes

Modules are users of Functions. There’s no inheritance going on.

Right. So, how would you go for identifying which Module has used which Function?
As of right now I just guess this by the order of insertion in the _modules ordered dictionary.

Functions hold no references to functions, and neither do modules (they are stateless).

Alright, then, how do you know what Module has created what Function, despite guessing it?
I mean, how do I know to which module I shall attach a forward hook in order to capture the input / output at a specific Function node in the graph?