Param names to integer index mappings

1

Hi

The KV store can accept either string or integer indexes. The mxnet python module uses string keys while interacting with the kv store - for example this line does the init using the param names- python/mxnet/model.py#L100. The optimizer’s interface uses a integer key. The mapping from string name to integer index is maintained in two places -

In a straightforward use case, both of these mappings will be the same because of the keys are initialized in the same order as in the param_names list. However this can break quite easily - if the kv store has already some keys initialized before being passed to the module.

I think the cleanest solution here is to update the optimizers interface to work with string indexes instead of integers, so that the mapping does not have to be duplicated. Is that something already planned? Is there any other quick fix available? My use case is that i am looking to use the kv store for some auxiliary tasks like computing the mean, std dev of input features of the data across all the workers, adding up the validation loss across the workers etc.

2

int keys are kept for backward compatibility. str keys are passed to optimizer for local kvstore: https://github.com/apache/incubator-mxnet/blob/master/src/kvstore/kvstore_local.h#L172
Does you use case break when using local kvstore? Can you post a code-snippet?

3

no local kv store works fine. But for dist_async kv store, integer keys are used while calling the optimizer. And due to reason described above, the mappings in the kv store and in the optimizer (param_idx2name) may not be the same. is that going to be addressed soon?