# Deep Learning with TensorFlow and the Keras Functional API

First steps with the Keras Functional API

This tutorial is based on the companion notebook for the excellent book Deep Learning with Python, Second Edition by François Chollet. The original code can be found here.

TensorFlow is an open source platform for machine learning provided by Google (installation tutorial for TensorFlow 2).

Built on top of TensorFlow 2, Keras is a central part of the tightly-connected TensorFlow 2 ecosystem, covering every step of the machine learning workflow, from data management to hyperparameter training to deployment solutions. Keras is used by CERN (e.g., at the LHC), NASA and many more scientific organizations around the world. Furthermore, it is one of the most used deep learning frameworks among top winning teams on Kaggle.

## First steps

The Keras sequential model is easy to use, but its applicability is extremely limited: it can only express models with a single input and a single output, applying one layer after the other in a sequential fashion.

In practice, it’s pretty common to encounter models with multiple inputs (say, an image and its metadata), multiple outputs (different things you want to predict about the data), or a nonlinear topology. In such cases, you’d build your model using the Functional API.

## Setup

from tensorflow import keras
from tensorflow.keras import layers

import numpy as np


## Simple example

A simple Functional model with two Dense layers:

# Declare an input (sample has shape 3,1)
inputs = keras.Input(shape=(3,), name="my_input")

# Create a layer and call it on the input
features = layers.Dense(64, activation="relu")(inputs)

# Create final output layer and call it on the features
outputs = layers.Dense(10, activation="softmax")(features)

# Specify inputs and outputs in the Model constructor
model = keras.Model(inputs=inputs, outputs=outputs)


Let’s take a look at the objects:

inputs.shape

TensorShape([None, 3])

• The number of samples per batch is variable (indicated by the None batch size).
• The model will process batches where each sample has shape (3,) (wich is the same as (3,1)).
inputs.dtype

tf.float32

• The batches will have dtype float32.

We call such an object a symbolic tensor. It doesn’t contain any actual data, but it encodes the specifications of the actual tensors of data that the model will see when you use it. It stands for future tensors of data.

features.shape

TensorShape([None, 64])


Summary of the model:

model.summary()

Model: "model"
_________________________________________________________________
Layer (type)                Output Shape              Param #
=================================================================
my_input (InputLayer)       [(None, 3)]               0

dense_6 (Dense)             (None, 64)                256

dense_7 (Dense)             (None, 10)                650

=================================================================
Total params: 906
Trainable params: 906
Non-trainable params: 0
_________________________________________________________________


## Multi-input, multi-output

Unlike the previous toy model, most deep learning models don’t look like lists—they look like graphs. They may, for instance, have multiple inputs or multiple outputs. It’s for this kind of model that the Functional API really shines.

Let’s say you’re building a system to rank customer support tickets by priority and route them to the appropriate department.

1. The title of the ticket (text input)
2. The text body of the ticket (text input)
3. Any tags added by the user (categorical input, assumed here to be one-hot encoded)

We can encode the text inputs as arrays of ones and zeros of size vocabulary_size

Your model also has two outputs:

• The priority score of the ticket, a scalar between 0 and 1 (sigmoid output)
• The department that should handle the ticket (a softmax over the set of departments)

You can build this model in a few lines with the Functional API.

# 1) DEFINE VARIABLES
# Size of vocabulary obtained when preprocessing text data
vocabulary_size = 10000
# Number of unique issue tags
num_tags = 100
# Number of departments for predictions
num_departments = 4

# 2) DEFINE MODEL INPUTS
# Title of tickets
title = keras.Input(shape=(vocabulary_size,), name="title")
# Body of the tickets
text_body = keras.Input(shape=(vocabulary_size,), name="text_body")
tags = keras.Input(shape=(num_tags,), name="tags")

# 3) FEATURES
# Combine input
features = layers.Concatenate()([title, text_body, tags])
# Intermediate layer
features = layers.Dense(64, activation="relu")(features)

# 4) DEFINE MODEL OUTPUTS
# Priority score of the ticket
priority = layers.Dense(1, activation="sigmoid", name="priority")(features)
# Department that should handle the ticket
department = layers.Dense(
num_departments, activation="softmax", name="department")(features)

# 5) CREATE MODEL
# Specify inputs and outputs
model = keras.Model(inputs=[title, text_body, tags], outputs=[priority, department])


### Training

Option 1: Providing lists of input & target arrays

First, we create some random input data with values between 0 and 2 as well as random data for our labels. We will use this data to train our model:

# Define total number of samples
num_samples = 100

# Create random input data
title_data = np.random.randint(0, 2, size=(num_samples, vocabulary_size))
text_body_data = np.random.randint(0, 2, size=(num_samples, vocabulary_size))
tags_data = np.random.randint(0, 2, size=(num_samples, num_tags))

# Create random labels
priority_data = np.random.random(size=(num_samples, 1))
department_data = np.random.randint(0, 2, size=(num_samples, num_departments))

# Compile model
model.compile(optimizer="rmsprop",
loss=["mean_squared_error", "categorical_crossentropy"],
metrics=[["mean_absolute_error"], ["accuracy"]])

# Fit model to data
model.fit([title_data, text_body_data, tags_data],
[priority_data, department_data],
epochs=1)

# Evaluate model
model.evaluate([title_data, text_body_data, tags_data],
[priority_data, department_data])

# Make predictions
priority_preds, department_preds = model.predict([title_data, text_body_data, tags_data])

4/4 [==============================] - 0s 10ms/step - loss: 86.6427 - priority_loss: 0.3638 - department_loss: 86.2789 - priority_mean_absolute_error: 0.5300 - department_accuracy: 0.2600
4/4 [==============================] - 0s 3ms/step - loss: 55.1070 - priority_loss: 0.3638 - department_loss: 54.7432 - priority_mean_absolute_error: 0.5300 - department_accuracy: 0.2300


Option 2: Providing dicts of input & target arrays

If you don’t want to rely on input order (for instance, because you have many inputs or outputs), you can also leverage the names you gave to the Input objects and the output layers, and pass data via dictionaries.

model.compile(optimizer="rmsprop",
loss={"priority": "mean_squared_error", "department": "categorical_crossentropy"},
metrics={"priority": ["mean_absolute_error"], "department": ["accuracy"]})

model.fit({"title": title_data, "text_body": text_body_data, "tags": tags_data},
{"priority": priority_data, "department": department_data},
epochs=1)

model.evaluate({"title": title_data, "text_body": text_body_data, "tags": tags_data},
{"priority": priority_data, "department": department_data})

priority_preds, department_preds = model.predict(
{"title": title_data, "text_body": text_body_data, "tags": tags_data})

4/4 [==============================] - 1s 10ms/step - loss: 119.7109 - priority_loss: 0.3638 - department_loss: 119.3471 - priority_mean_absolute_error: 0.5300 - department_accuracy: 0.3900
4/4 [==============================] - 0s 3ms/step - loss: 102.1632 - priority_loss: 0.3638 - department_loss: 101.7994 - priority_mean_absolute_error: 0.5300 - department_accuracy: 0.5600


### Access layers

A Functional model is an explicit graph data structure. This makes it possible to inspect how layers are connected and reuse previous graph nodes (which are layer outputs) as part of new models. This enables two important use cases:

• model visualization and
• feature extraction.

Let’s visualize the connectivity of the model we just defined (the topology of the model). You can plot a Functional model as a graph with the plot_model():

keras.utils.plot_model(model, "ticket_classifier.png")


You can add to this plot the input and output shapes of each layer in the model, which can be helpful during debugging:

keras.utils.plot_model(model, "ticket_classifier_with_shape_info.png", show_shapes=True)


The “None” in the tensor shapes represents the batch size: this model allows batches of any size.

### Retrieving inputs or outputs

Access to layer connectivity also means that you can inspect and reuse individual nodes (layer calls) in the graph. The model.layers model property provides the list of layers that make up the model, and for each layer you can query layer.input and layer.output

model.layers

[<keras.engine.input_layer.InputLayer at 0x7fb15a2b68e0>,
<keras.engine.input_layer.InputLayer at 0x7fb15a2b6910>,
<keras.engine.input_layer.InputLayer at 0x7fb15a2b6190>,
<keras.layers.merge.Concatenate at 0x7fb15a2b6b20>,
<keras.layers.core.dense.Dense at 0x7fb18875e910>,
<keras.layers.core.dense.Dense at 0x7fb1713447f0>,
<keras.layers.core.dense.Dense at 0x7fb17134dcd0>]

model.layers[3].input

[<KerasTensor: shape=(None, 10000) dtype=float32 (created by layer 'title')>,
<KerasTensor: shape=(None, 10000) dtype=float32 (created by layer 'text_body')>,
<KerasTensor: shape=(None, 100) dtype=float32 (created by layer 'tags')>]

model.layers[3].output

<KerasTensor: shape=(None, 20100) dtype=float32 (created by layer 'concatenate')>


This enables you to do feature extraction, creating models that reuse intermediate features from another model. Let’s say you want to add another output to the previous model—you want to estimate how long a given issue ticket will take to resolve, a kind of difficulty rating. You could do this via a classification layer over three categories: “quick,” “medium,” and “difficult.”

You don’t need to recreate and retrain a model from scratch. You can start from the intermediate features of your previous model, since you have access to them, like this.

### Creating a new model

Creating a new model by reusing intermediate layer outputs:

# layers[4] is our intermediate Dense layer
features = model.layers[4].output

difficulty = layers.Dense(3, activation="softmax", name="difficulty")(features)

new_model = keras.Model(
inputs=[title, text_body, tags],
outputs=[priority, department, difficulty])

keras.utils.plot_model(new_model, "updated_ticket_classifier.png", show_shapes=True)


##### Jan Kirenz
###### Professor

I’m a data scientist educator and consultant.