Guide for Devs¶

Main Structure of the Code¶

nn4mc is composed by the following modules:

data_structures:
	Contains Tensors, Weights, Layers and NeuralNetwork.
parser:	Parses an incoming file to output a NeuralNetwork object.
code_generator:	Takes in a NeuralNetwork object to generate files with C/C++ code.

data_structues/Tensor¶

Tensor objects are mostly used in this work when we need to store large arrays, especially of the float or double variable types that occupy lots of space. What makes a Tensor special is that any matrix or array that is converted into a tensor becomes part of a large sequence of characters and this object type makes us capable of converting to and from said sequence of characters. For example, instead of having float arr[3] = {1.000, 1.000, 1.000} we have a tensor that under the hood stores our array into a slightly more complicated verion but similar to “1.00001.0001.000” . To declare a Tensor we need two things: A std::vector<int> that indicates the sizes of each dimension in the tensor. Then, to assign numerical values at specific points in a Tensor, we use a pointer to the tensor and the assignment operator. Here is an example of how to declare and populate a Tensor.

std::vector<int> dimensions;
dimensions.push_back(5);
dimensions.push_back(2); // a 5x2 matrix

Tensor<double> T = Tensor<double>(dimensions);

for(int i=0; i<dimensions[0]; i++)
  {
          for(int j=0; j<dimensions[1]; j++)
          {
                  T(i,j) = i*dimensions[1] + j;
          }
   }

Data Structures¶

The data_structures module in nn4mc contains all the built-in data structures, such as weights, layers, tensors and neural networks.

Parser¶

Parser is the first interface between the model file and nn4mc this is independent of code_generator, however, code_generator takes as input an object that may be generated using a Parser. It takes as input the file that contains the model and outputs a NeuralNetwork object with all the complete information.

Code Generator¶

code_generator takes as input the NeuralNetwork object generated and populated using any of the Parser instances and outputs a set of C/C++ files with all the code that can execute the neural network operations.

data_structures/Weight¶

Weights contain a single Tensor. Even though layers contain both weights and biases, these weights and biases are saved as instances of weight. This means that a layer will have two pointers to weight objects; one for the weights and one for the biases. Weights have a specific method that might come in handy and it is called Weight::get_weight_tensor(). This allows us to copy the values for the weight tensor.

data_structures/Layer¶

Layers are the most functional objects for neural networks. Different layer types will yield different outputs and will process differently the data, e.g. a fully connected (Dense) layer’s output will be different from a convolutional layer output. To declare a new layer we just instantiate the name of the layer type because layer type objects derive from Layer, which is an abstract class. Currently, the layer type objects that can be instantiated are the following:

Dense:	This is a fully connected or dense layer. An MLP will have only Dense layers.
Activation:	Sometimes Keras users add activations as if they were independent layers. This accounts for when the user does that.
Conv1D:	Performs 1D convolutions for 1D signal processing. This object fills out all the required arguments needed for these layer types.
Conv2D:	Contains all the necessary components to perform 2D convolutions.
MaxPooling1D:	Contains all the necessary components to perform 1D maxpooling.
MaxPooling2D:	Contains all the necessary components to perform 2D maxpooling.
Activation:	Contains all the necessary components to perform activation layers as separate layers.
Dropout:	Contains all the necessary components to at least read dropout layers even though the feedforward process does not require any additional processing from the dropout part.

In the future, we will add the following layer types:

GRU:	Will contain the necessary components to perform GRUs.
LSTM:	Will contain the necessary components to perform LSTMs.
SimpleRNN:	Will contain the necessary components to perform simple RNNs.

data_structures/NeuralNetwork¶

NeuralNetwork is a directed graph that can be transversed using BFS. Each node of NeuralNetwork points at a layer type object and at a weight and bias tensor.

parser/HDF5Parser¶

HDF5Parser takes as input an .hdf5 file and extracts all the information to output a NeuralNetwork object with all of the necessary pieces filled out from the information in the file.

parser/PickleParser¶

PickleParser will soon be a capability in nn4mc. This will take as input a .pth file coming from PyTorch and will generate the same neural network that HDF5Parser exports.