Gated Recurrent Unit with Layer norm and Xavier initializer

gru.py

from __future__ import absolute_import
from __future__ import division
from __future__ import print_function

import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf


class GRU(tf.contrib.rnn.RNNCell):

  def __init__(
      self, size, activation=tf.tanh, reuse=None,
      normalizer=tf.contrib.layers.layer_norm,
      initializer=tf.contrib.layers.xavier_initializer()):
    super(GRU, self).__init__(_reuse=reuse)
    self._size = size
    self._activation = activation
    self._normalizer = normalizer
    self._initializer = initializer

  @property
  def state_size(self):
    return self._size

  @property
  def output_size(self):
    return self._size

  def call(self, input_, state):
    update, reset = tf.split(self._forward(
        'update_reset', [state, input_], 2 * self._size, tf.nn.sigmoid,
        bias_initializer=tf.constant_initializer(-1.)), 2, 1)
    candidate = self._forward(
        'candidate', [reset * state, input_], self._size, self._activation)
    state = (1 - update) * state + update * candidate
    return state, state

  def _forward(self, name, inputs, size, activation, **kwargs):
    with tf.variable_scope(name):
      return _forward(
          inputs, size, activation, normalizer=self._normalizer,
          weight_initializer=self._initializer, **kwargs)


def _forward(
    inputs, size, activation, normalizer=tf.contrib.layers.layer_norm,
    weight_initializer=tf.contrib.layers.xavier_initializer(),
    bias_initializer=tf.zeros_initializer()):
  if not isinstance(inputs, (tuple, list)):
    inputs = (inputs,)
  shapes = []
  outputs = []
  # Map each input to individually normalize their outputs.
  for index, input_ in enumerate(inputs):
    shapes.append(input_.shape[1: -1].as_list())
    input_ = tf.contrib.layers.flatten(input_)
    weight = tf.get_variable(
        'weight_{}'.format(index + 1), (int(input_.shape[1]), size),
        tf.float32, weight_initializer)
    output = tf.matmul(input_, weight)
    if normalizer:
      output = normalizer(output)
    outputs.append(output)
  output = tf.reduce_mean(outputs, 0)
  # Add bias after normalization.
  bias = tf.get_variable(
      'weight', (size,), tf.float32, bias_initializer)
  output += bias
  # Activation function.
  if activation:
    output = activation(output)
  # Restore shape dimensions that are consistent among inputs.
  min_dim = min(len(shape[1:]) for shape in shapes)
  dim_shapes = [[shape[dim] for shape in shapes] for dim in range(min_dim)]
  matching_dims = ''.join('NY'[len(set(x)) == 1] for x in dim_shapes) + 'N'
  agreement = matching_dims.index('N')
  remaining = sum(np.prod(shape[agreement:]) for shape in shapes)
  if agreement:
    batch_size = output.shape[0].value or -1
    shape = [batch_size] + shapes[:agreement] + [remaining]
    output = tf.reshape(output, shape)
  return output

I am trying to use this GRU cell and i am getting below error:

File "rnn.py", line 94, in _forward
output = tf.reshape(output, shape)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/ops/gen_array_ops.py", line 3938, in reshape
"Reshape", tensor=tensor, shape=shape, name=name)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/op_def_library.py", line 513, in _apply_op_helper
raise err
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/op_def_library.py", line 510, in _apply_op_helper
preferred_dtype=default_dtype)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/ops.py", line 926, in internal_convert_to_tensor
ret = conversion_func(value, dtype=dtype, name=name, as_ref=as_ref)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/constant_op.py", line 229, in _constant_tensor_conversion_function
return constant(v, dtype=dtype, name=name)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/constant_op.py", line 208, in constant
value, dtype=dtype, shape=shape, verify_shape=verify_shape))
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/tensorflow/python/framework/tensor_util.py", line 472, in make_tensor_proto
"supported type." % (type(values), values))
TypeError: Failed to convert object of type <class 'list'> to Tensor. Contents: [None, -1]. Consider casting elements to a supported type.

Variables before error are these:
dim = 0
shapes = [[], []]
output = Tensor("rnn/while/rnn/multi_rnn_cell/cell_0/cell_0/gru/update_reset/Sigmoid:0", shape=(?, 400), dtype=float32)
shape = [None, -1]

i am trying to test this using the sequence classification code from here https://gist.github.com/danijar/c7ec9a30052127c7a1ad169eeb83f159, which has hidden layer length of 200.

Thanks for reporting and sorry for finding this comment so late. The code used to only work with static batch size. I just updated it to also work when the batch size is unknown.