Printing the loss during TensorFlow training

Question

I am looking at the TensorFlow “MNIST For ML Beginners” tutorial, and I want to print out the training loss after every training step.

My training loop currently looks like this:

for i in range(100):
    batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(100)
    sess.run(train_step, feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})

Now, train_step is defined as:

train_step = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.01).minimize(cross_entropy)

Where cross_entropy is the loss which I want to print out:

cross_entropy = -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y))

One way to print this would be to explicitly compute cross_entropy in the training loop:

for i in range(100):
    batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(100)
    cross_entropy = -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y))
    print 'loss = ' + str(cross_entropy)
    sess.run(train_step, feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})

I now have two questions regarding this:

Given that cross_entropy is already computed during sess.run(train_step, ...), it seems inefficient to compute it twice, requiring twice the number of forward passes of all the training data. Is there a way to access the value of cross_entropy when it was computed during sess.run(train_step, ...)?
How do I even print a tf.Variable? Using str(cross_entropy) gives me an error…

Thank you!

Asked By: Karnivaurus

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Source

Answer 1

Instead of just running the training_step, run also the cross_entropy node so that its value is returned to you. Remember that:

var_as_a_python_value = sess.run(tensorflow_variable)

will give you what you want, so you can do this:

[_, cross_entropy_py] = sess.run([train_step, cross_entropy],
                                 feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})

to both run the training and pull out the value of the cross entropy as it was computed during the iteration. Note that I turned both the arguments to sess.run and the return values into a list so that both happen.

Answered By: dga

Answer 2

You can fetch the value of cross_entropy by adding it to the list of arguments to sess.run(...). For example, your for-loop could be rewritten as follows:

for i in range(100):
    batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(100)
    cross_entropy = -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y))
    _, loss_val = sess.run([train_step, cross_entropy],
                           feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})
    print 'loss = ' + loss_val

The same approach can be used to print the current value of a variable. Let’s say, in addition to the value of cross_entropy, you wanted to print the value of a tf.Variable called W, you could do the following:

for i in range(100):
    batch_xs, batch_ys = mnist.train.next_batch(100)
    cross_entropy = -tf.reduce_sum(y_ * tf.log(y))
    _, loss_val, W_val = sess.run([train_step, cross_entropy, W],
                                  feed_dict={x: batch_xs, y_: batch_ys})
    print 'loss = %s' % loss_val
    print 'W = %s' % W_val

Answered By: mrry

Printing the loss during TensorFlow training

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