vojtamolda / tensor-thumbnail Goto Github PK

Generally, visualizing higher-dimensional spaces is a tricky problem that has a tendency to quite a bit mess with one's brain 👻. So most likely there's not going to be a silver bullet solution that pleases everybody.

The key objective of the visualization diagram is clarity. It should be possible to look at the diagram and intuitively reconstruct back the exact shape of the tensor. The diagram should also try to display the dimensions in proportion to each other. So it is clear at the first sight how two tensors can be multiplied or how to feed them to a neural network layer.

Typical use-case of higher dimensional diagram is an input tensor of a 2D convolution layer. Most frequently used convention for a batch of images is [B, C, H, W]. Meaning of the dimensions is the following: B - batch size, C - number of channels, H - height and W - width.

Clicking the 👁️ icon in Xcode Debugger displays very useful previews for built-in types. For example it can show a preview of an image, color, cursor, bezier path and many more types.

Here's an example:

Since about 2014 it is possible to implement custom quick look behavior for user defined data types. Here is Apple's official documentation on how to do it.

Unfortunately, as of Xcode 12 custom quick look isn't possible for structs. To the extent of my knowledge the debugQuickLookObject() method is called only for classes. It requires @objc decorator responsible for Objective-C bridging in order to work properly. Since TensorFlow.Tensor is a struct there's no way to implement this feature unless Apple decides to allow it and changes the implementation in Xcode.

Below is an example main.swift file that demonstrates the problem. When debugging the application QuickLookClass shows a nice rectangle view after clicking the quick look icon. Whereas QuickLookStruct doesn't show anything even tough the implementation is identical

import SwiftUI

/// A simple example view.
struct RedRectangleView: View {
    var body: some View {
       Rectangle()
        .fill()
        .foregroundColor(.red)
        .cornerRadius(5)
    }
}

/// A class with working Quick Look in Xcode Debugger.
class QuickLookClass {
    init() { }
    
    @objc
    func debugQuickLookObject() -> NSView {
        let window = NSWindow(contentRect: NSRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 20, height: 20),
                              styleMask: [.borderless], backing: .buffered, defer: false)
        window.contentView = NSHostingView(rootView: RedRectangleView())
        return window.contentView!
    }
}

/// A struct with broken Quick Look in Xcode Debugger.
struct QuickLookStruct {
    init() { }

    func debugQuickLookObject() -> NSView {
        let window = NSWindow(contentRect: NSRect(x: 0, y: 0, width: 20, height: 20),
                              styleMask: [.borderless], backing: .buffered, defer: false)
        window.contentView = NSHostingView(rootView: RedRectangleView())
        return window.contentView!
    }
}


let qlClass = QuickLookClass()
let qlStruct = QuickLookStruct()

print(qlStruct, qlClass)