How to set layer-wise learning rate in Tensorflow?

Update Jan 22: recipe below is only a good idea for GradientDescentOptimizer , other optimizers that keep a running average will apply learning rate before the parameter update, so recipe below won't affect that part of the equation

In addition to Rafal's approach, you could use compute_gradients, apply_gradients interface of Optimizer. For instance, here's a toy network where I use 2x the learning rate for second parameter

x = tf.Variable(tf.ones([]))
y = tf.Variable(tf.zeros([]))
loss = tf.square(x-y)
global_step = tf.Variable(0, name="global_step", trainable=False)

opt = tf.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=0.1)
grads_and_vars = opt.compute_gradients(loss, [x, y])
ygrad, _ = grads_and_vars[1]
train_op = opt.apply_gradients([grads_and_vars[0], (ygrad*2, y)], global_step=global_step)

init_op = tf.initialize_all_variables()
sess = tf.Session()
sess.run(init_op)
for i in range(5):
  sess.run([train_op, loss, global_step])
  print sess.run([x, y])

You should see

[0.80000001, 0.40000001]
[0.72000003, 0.56]
[0.68800002, 0.62400001]
[0.67520005, 0.64960003]
[0.67008007, 0.65984005]

It can be achieved quite easily with 2 optimizers:

var_list1 = [variables from first 5 layers]
var_list2 = [the rest of variables]
train_op1 = GradientDescentOptimizer(0.00001).minimize(loss, var_list=var_list1)
train_op2 = GradientDescentOptimizer(0.0001).minimize(loss, var_list=var_list2)
train_op = tf.group(train_op1, train_op2)

One disadvantage of this implementation is that it computes tf.gradients(.) twice inside the optimizers and thus it might not be optimal in terms of execution speed. This can be mitigated by explicitly calling tf.gradients(.), splitting the list into 2 and passing corresponding gradients to both optimizers.

Related question: Holding variables constant during optimizer

EDIT: Added more efficient but longer implementation:

var_list1 = [variables from first 5 layers]
var_list2 = [the rest of variables]
opt1 = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.00001)
opt2 = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(0.0001)
grads = tf.gradients(loss, var_list1 + var_list2)
grads1 = grads[:len(var_list1)]
grads2 = grads[len(var_list1):]
tran_op1 = opt1.apply_gradients(zip(grads1, var_list1))
train_op2 = opt2.apply_gradients(zip(grads2, var_list2))
train_op = tf.group(train_op1, train_op2)

You can use tf.trainable_variables() to get all training variables and decide to select from them. The difference is that in the first implementation tf.gradients(.) is called twice inside the optimizers. This may cause some redundant operations to be executed (e.g. gradients on the first layer can reuse some computations for the gradients of the following layers).

Tensorflow 1.7 introduced tf.custom_gradient that greatly simplifies setting learning rate multipliers, in a way that is now compatible with any optimizer, including those accumulating gradient statistics. For example,

import tensorflow as tf

def lr_mult(alpha):
  @tf.custom_gradient
  def _lr_mult(x):
    def grad(dy):
      return dy * alpha * tf.ones_like(x)
    return x, grad
  return _lr_mult

x0 = tf.Variable(1.)
x1 = tf.Variable(1.)
loss = tf.square(x0) + tf.square(lr_mult(0.1)(x1))

step = tf.train.GradientDescentOptimizer(learning_rate=0.1).minimize(loss)

sess = tf.InteractiveSession()
tf.global_variables_initializer().run()
tf.local_variables_initializer().run()

for _ in range(5):
  sess.run([step])
  print(sess.run([x0, x1, loss]))