Want contribution for providing more primitive operations.

Background

It would be helpful that Chainer had more primitive operations, especially driving novel directions of deep learning research. Providing flexibility in such is one of Chainers most important objectives.

Goal

Because we have quite restricted development resource, we would appreciate if we had Chainer community’s precious contribution to provide more primitive operations.

What primitive operations Chainer does not support now?

Here shows a list of primitive operations that Chainer does not provide currently compared with other major deep learning frameworks.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tHQcuKhqYiDUo57uOWOtW_mUqrHmsP9fZzaQRA2dW5k/edit?usp=sharing

How to implement a primitive operation?

Sample works There are some PRs that implements primitive operations and you can follow with.

• #1007 clip function
• #1262 stack function
• #1401 rollaxis function

Overall steps The following are overall steps to implement a Chainer function.

1. Keep a WIP pull request
   • Keep a work-in-progress pull request to show you are on work for a primitive operations.
   • You can make an empty commit with git --allow-empty -m "Empty commit to keep PR." to send an empty pull request to begin with.
2. Implement and test a Chainer function.
   • Implement a Chainer function and its test. You need to implement forward computation and backward computation for CPU and GPU respectively.
   • For detail on how to write a Chainer function, please see the following tutorial. http://docs.chainer.org/en/stable/tutorial/function.html
3. Document a Chainer function.
   • Write a documentation for your Chainer function and add it to sphinx source file.
4. Take a review.
   • Ask Chainer team to review your PR. After your PR passes the review, it is merged into Chainer’s master branch.

[aksub99]

I’d like to implement ELiSH activation function as introduced in this paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.00783

[UmashankarTriforce]

Anyway, I will review the list soon.

I’m adding whatever I see has changed in chainer to the list too 😃