How can I copy a variable in tensorflow

Question

In numpy I can create a copy of the variable with numpy.copy. Is there a similar method, that I can use to create a copy of a Tensor in TensorFlow?

Answer 1

You can do this in a couple of ways.

• this will create you a copy: v2 = tf.Variable(v1)
• you can also use identity op: v2 = tf.identity(v1) (which I think is a proper way of doing it.

Here is a code example:

import tensorflow as tf

v1 = tf.Variable([[1, 2], [3, 4]])
v_copy1 = tf.Variable(v1)
v_copy2 = tf.identity(v1)

init = tf.initialize_all_variables()
sess = tf.Session()
sess.run(init)
a, b = sess.run([v_copy1, v_copy2])
sess.close()

print a
print b

Both of them would print the same tensors.