Assertion and Testing

Chainer provides some facilities to make debugging easy.

Type checking utilities

FunctionNode uses a systematic type checking of the chainer.utils.type_check module. It enables users to easily find bugs of forward and backward implementations. You can find examples of type checking in some function implementations.

chainer.utils.type_check.Expr Abstract syntax tree of an expression.
chainer.utils.type_check.expect Evaluates and tests all given expressions.
chainer.utils.type_check.TypeInfo Type information of an input/gradient array.
chainer.utils.type_check.TypeInfoTuple Type information of input/gradient tuples.

Gradient checking utilities

Most function implementations are numerically tested by gradient checking. This method computes numerical gradients of forward routines and compares their results with the corresponding backward routines. It enables us to make the source of issues clear when we hit an error of gradient computations. The chainer.gradient_check module makes it easy to implement the gradient checking.

chainer.gradient_check.check_backward
chainer.gradient_check.numerical_grad

Standard Assertions

The assertions have same names as NumPy’s ones. The difference from NumPy is that they can accept both numpy.ndarray and cupy.ndarray.

chainer.testing.assert_allclose
chainer.testing.assert_warns

Function testing utilities

Utilities for testing functions.

chainer.testing.unary_math_function_unittest

Serialization testing utilities

Utilities for testing serializable objects.

chainer.testing.save_and_load
chainer.testing.save_and_load_hdf5
chainer.testing.save_and_load_npz
chainer.testing.get_trainer_with_mock_updater

Trainer Extension Testing Utilities

Utilities for testing trainer extensions.

chainer.testing.get_trainer_with_mock_updater

Repeat decorators

These decorators have a decorated test run multiple times in a single invocation. Criteria of passing / failing of the test changes according to the type of decorators. See the documentation of each decorator for details.

chainer.testing.condition.repeat_with_success_at_least
chainer.testing.condition.repeat
chainer.testing.condition.retry

Unit test annotation

Decorators for annotating unit tests.

chainer.testing.attr.gpu Decorator to indicate that GPU is required to run the test.
chainer.testing.attr.multi_gpu Decorator to indicate number of GPUs required to run the test.
chainer.testing.with_requires
chainer.testing.fix_random

Parameterized test

Decorators for making a unit test parameterized.

chainer.testing.parameterize
chainer.testing.product
chainer.testing.product_dict