[sandGorgon]

Hey guys, if I could request... Please fix the serialization story for tensorflow. There 6 googleable methods to export from tensorflow and nobody knows what will work on the cloud, what can be exported from cloudml and what can be loaded on Android.

It has to be consistent and there has to be one way to do it.

I personally have a 10 message thread with Google cloud support on exporting a Cloud trained model to tensorflow and nobody could figure it out [Case #13619720].

[alextp]

Did you try using SavedModel? It should be seamless to use downstream with tensorflow serving and it's not that hard to get estimators to spit those out.

[sandGorgon]

I really wish. https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/12750

In fact if you dig up the case, then even official support told me that savedmodel needs some freezing using bazel otherwise it doesn't work.

The github page and stackoverflow are full of these. If you can, please take the message to the other side :(

I don't think the cloud guys (where training will happen in distributed mode) talk to the android guys (where models will be used after quantization). There is a huge serialization problem that all of us are currently struggling with.

[alextp]

Ah, I didn't know SavedModel didn't work in android. I think freezing is still the way to go there? I'm sorry, I don't personally work on the mobile side of things.

[sandGorgon]

I should apologize for hijacking this thread(and i'll stop here). But Tensorflow is getting to be unusable because of the serialization story. We don't have such issues on Caffe2 or anywhere else. It essentially means different parts of the tensorflow ecosystem are unable to talk to each other.

I really pray the tensorflow teams give it due importance.

[petewarden]

I'm the original author of the freeze_graph script, so I'm to blame for a lot of the on-going mess here. For what it's worth I'm actively working on cleaning this up, since I know what a painful experience it is. Apologies for everyone who's struggled with this, and I will take a look at the case number mentioned above and follow up internally to see if there's anything I can help with.

[sandGorgon]

Thanks for this! I would like to bring two things to your attention :

1. We don't know what to use and its very confusing. For example, now there is https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42216208/should-tensorfl.... Will freeze_graph become canonical and we forget about SavedModel? And everything else deprecated? It should be part of the core API and workable on CloudML, where we don't have a lot of control on running scripts and certainly not Bazel builds.

2. Android/ios story. Now you have the Pixel Visual Core as well... Please make it seamless all the way to Android or Ios or raspberry pi (whatever you guys support).