How to get weights in tf.layers.dense?

Question

I wanna draw the weights of tf.layers.dense in tensorboard histogram, but it not show in the parameter, how could I do that?

Answer 1

The latest tensorflow layers api creates all the variables using the tf.get_variable call. This ensures that if you wish to use the variable again, you can just use the tf.get_variable function and provide the name of the variable that you wish to obtain.

In the case of a tf.layers.dense, the variable is created as: layer_name/kernel. So, you can obtain the variable by saying:

with tf.variable_scope("layer_name", reuse=True):
    weights = tf.get_variable("kernel") # do not specify
    # the shape here or it will confuse tensorflow into creating a new one.

[Edit]: The new version of Tensorflow now has both Functional and Object-Oriented interfaces to the layers api. If you need the layers only for computational purposes, then using the functional api is a good choice. The function names start with small letters for instance -> tf.layers.dense(...). The Layer Objects can be created using capital first letters e.g. -> tf.layers.Dense(...). Once you have a handle to this layer object, you can use all of its functionality. For obtaining the weights, just use obj.trainable_weights this returns a list of all the trainable variables found in that layer's scope.