Sonnet is a library built on top of TensorFlow for building complex neural networks.

To install Sonnet, you will need to compile the library using bazel against the TensorFlow header files. You should have installed TensorFlow by following the TensorFlow installation instructions.

This installation is compatible with Linux/Mac OS X and Python 2.7 and 3.4. The version of TensorFlow installed must be at least 1.2. Installing Sonnet supports the virtualenv installation mode of TensorFlow, as well as the native pip install.

Ensure you have a recent version of bazel (>= 0.4.5) and JDK (>= 1.8). If not, follow these directions.

If using virtualenv, activate your virtualenv for the rest of the installation, otherwise skip this step:

$ source $VIRTUALENV_PATH/bin/activate # bash, sh, ksh, or zsh
$ source $VIRTUALENV_PATH/bin/activate.csh  # csh or tcsh

First clone the Sonnet source code with TensorFlow as a submodule:

$ git clone --recursive https://github.com/deepmind/sonnet

and then call configure:

$ cd sonnet/tensorflow
$ ./configure
$ cd ../

You can choose the suggested defaults during the TensorFlow configuration. Note: This will not modify your existing installation of TensorFlow. This step is necessary so that Sonnet can build against the TensorFlow headers.

Run the install script to create a wheel file in a temporary directory:

$ mkdir /tmp/sonnet
$ bazel build --config=opt :install
$ ./bazel-bin/install /tmp/sonnet

pip install the generated wheel file:

$ pip install /tmp/sonnet/*.whl

If Sonnet was already installed, uninstall prior to calling pip install on the wheel file:

$ pip uninstall sonnet

You can verify that Sonnet has been successfully installed by, for example, trying out the resampler op:

$ cd ~/
$ python
>>> import sonnet as snt
>>> import tensorflow as tf
>>> snt.resampler(tf.constant([0.]), tf.constant([0.]))

The expected output should be:

<tf.Tensor 'resampler/Resampler:0' shape=(1,) dtype=float32>

However, if an ImportError is raised then the C++ components were not found. Ensure that you are not importing the cloned source code (i.e. call python outside of the cloned repository) and that you have uninstalled Sonnet prior to installing the wheel file.

The following code constructs a Linear module and connects it to multiple inputs. The variables (i.e., the weights and biases of the linear transformation) are automatically shared.

import sonnet as snt

train_data = get_training_data()
test_data = get_test_data()

# Construct the module, providing any configuration necessary.
linear_regression_module = snt.Linear(output_size=FLAGS.output_size)

# Connect the module to some inputs, any number of times.
train_predictions = linear_regression_module(train_data)
test_predictions = linear_regression_module(test_data)

Check out the full documentation page here.