Conventions

oneDNN specification relies on a set of standard naming conventions for variables. This section describes these conventions.

Variable (Tensor) Names

Neural network models consist of operations of the following form:

dst=f(src,weights),

where dst and src are activation tensors, and weights are learnable tensors.

The backward propagation therefore consists in computing the gradients with respect to the srcweights` respectively:

diff_src=dfsrc(diff_dst,src,weights,dst),

and

diff_weights=dfweights(diff_dst,src,weights,dst).

While oneDNN uses src, dst, and weights as generic names for the activations and learnable tensors, for a specific operation there might be commonly used and widely known specific names for these tensors. For instance, the convolution operation has a learnable tensor called bias. For usability reasons, oneDNN primitives use such names in initialization and other functions.

oneDNN uses the following commonly used notations for tensors:

Name	Meaning
src	Source tensor
dst	Destination tensor
weights	Weights tensor
bias	Bias tensor (used in convolution, inner product and other primitives)
scale_shift	Scale and shift tensors (used in Batch Normalization and Layer normalization primitives)
workspace	Workspace tensor that carries additional information from the forward propagation to the backward propagation
scratchpad	Temporary tensor that is required to store the intermediate results
diff_src	Gradient tensor with respect to the source
diff_dst	Gradient tensor with respect to the destination
diff_weights	Gradient tensor with respect to the weights
diff_bias	Gradient tensor with respect to the bias
diff_scale_shift	Gradient tensor with respect to the scale and shift
*_layer	RNN layer data or weights tensors
*_iter	RNN recurrent data or weights tensors

RNN-Specific Notation

The following notations are used when describing RNN primitives.

Name	Semantics
⋅	matrix multiply operator
∗	elementwise multiplication operator
W	input weights
U	recurrent weights
◻T	transposition
B	bias
h	hidden state
a	intermediate value
x	input
◻t	timestamp index
◻l	layer index
activation	tanh, relu, logistic
c	cell state
˜c	candidate state
i	input gate
f	forget gate
o	output gate
u	update gate
r	reset gate