Serializers – saving and loading

Serializer is a simple interface to serialize or deserialize an object. Link, Optimizer, and Trainer support serialization.

Concrete serializers are defined in the serializers module. It supports NumPy NPZ and HDF5 formats.

For example, we can serialize a link object into NPZ file by the save_npz() function:

Assuming we have defined a model:

>>> from chainer import serializers
>>> serializers.save_npz('my.model', model)

This saves the parameters of model into the file 'my.model' in NPZ format. The saved model can be read back from my.model back into model by the load_npz() function:

>>> serializers.load_npz('my.model', model)

Note

Note that only the parameters and the persistent values are serialized by this serialization code. Other attributes are not saved automatically. You can register arrays, scalars, or any serializable objects as persistent values by the add_persistent() method. The registered values can be accessed by attributes of the name passed to the add_persistent method.

The state of an optimizer can also be saved by the same functions:

>>> serializers.save_npz('my.state', optimizer)
>>> serializers.load_npz('my.state', optimizer)

Note

Note that serialization of optimizer only saves its internal states including number of iterations, momentum vectors of MomentumSGD, etc. It does not save the parameters and persistent values of the target link. We have to explicitly save the target link with the optimizer to resume the optimization from saved states. This can be done by saving the entire Trainer object, like this:

>>> serializers.save_npz('my.state', trainer)

Support of the HDF5 format is enabled if the h5py package is installed. Serialization and deserialization with the HDF5 format are almost identical to those with the NPZ format; just replace save_npz() and load_npz() by save_hdf5() and load_hdf5(), respectively.