Keras, Tensorflow: How to set breakpoint (debug) in custom layer when evaluating?

In TensorFlow 2, you can now add breakpoints to the TensorFlow Keras models/layers, including when using the fit, evaluate, and predict methods. However, you must add model.run_eagerly = True after calling model.compile() for the values of the tensor to be available in the debugger at the breakpoint. For example,

import tensorflow as tf
from tensorflow.keras.layers import Dense
from tensorflow.keras.losses import BinaryCrossentropy
from tensorflow.keras.models import Model
from tensorflow.keras.optimizers import Adam


class SimpleModel(Model):

    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()
        self.dense0 = Dense(2)
        self.dense1 = Dense(1)

    def call(self, inputs):
        z = self.dense0(inputs)
        z = self.dense1(z)  # Breakpoint in IDE here. =====
        return z

x = tf.convert_to_tensor([[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]], dtype=tf.float32)

model0 = SimpleModel()
y0 = model0.call(x)  # Values of z shown at breakpoint. =====

model1 = SimpleModel()
model1.run_eagerly = True
model1.compile(optimizer=Adam(), loss=BinaryCrossentropy())
y1 = model1.predict(x)  # Values of z *not* shown at breakpoint. =====

model2 = SimpleModel()
model2.compile(optimizer=Adam(), loss=BinaryCrossentropy())
model2.run_eagerly = True
y2 = model2.predict(x)  # Values of z shown at breakpoint. =====

Note: this was tested in TensorFlow 2.0.0-rc0.


  1. Yes. The call() method is only used to build the computational graph.

  2. As to the debug. I prefer using TFDBG, which is a recommended debugging tool for tensorflow, although it doesn't provide break point functions.

For Keras, you can add these line to your script to use TFDBG

import tf.keras.backend as K
from tensorflow.python import debug as tf_debug
sess = K.get_session()
sess = tf_debug.LocalCLIDebugWrapperSession(sess)
K.set_session(sess)