More graph visualization

[beam2d]

Chainer currently has a feature of drawing the computational graph using graphviz, but the resulting graph is hard to dig into when the graph is very large and complicated. Relevant information like weight and activation statistics is also not shown in the graph. It is great if we have an interactive view of the computational graph with relevant information. This topic is influenced by TensorBoard, the official visualization tool for TensorFlow.

Supporting such a rich visualization on Chainer is not straight-forward, because Chainer does not build any graphs before training. The following list is a set of features possibly required for the visualization:

• Annotating a range of codes (by with statement or decorator) to specify a meaningful subgraph. We also have to provide a natural and standard way to reflect the link/chain structure into the computational graph by annotations.
• Richer version of graph dump. It should contain (at least statistics of) each variable, the annotation information, and the computational graph itself.
• A way to embed a running statistics (currently collected by LogReport extension) into the computational graph. It can be a feature separate from LogReport, but would use Reporter.
• UI to explore the dumped computational graph.

See also the discussion in the forum: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/chainer/GqXjtHCgQgE

[niboshi]

I'm working on this.
Some related issues: #75, #513, #561, #2215, #2005
(Perhaps the scope of #513 is beyond visualization.)

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This issue is closed as announced. Feel free to re-open it if needed.

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed after 30 days if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[mitmul]

Annotating a range of codes (by with statement or decorator) to specify a meaningful subgraph. We also have to provide a natural and standard way to reflect the link/chain structure into the computational graph by annotations.

This may be useful also for other purposes like ONNX export. Let's discuss the unified interface of such annotation feature.