Fail to export the model in PyTorch

When you try to export a model, you may receive a message similar to the following:

UserWarning: ONNX export failed on elu because torch.onnx.symbolic.elu does not exist
RuntimeError: ONNX export failed: Couldn't export operator elu

The export fails because PyTorch does not support exporting the elu operator. If you've already reached out to the ONNX team but haven't received a response, you can add support for this yourself. The difficulty of doing this depends on your answers to the following questions:

Determine how difficult it is to add support for the operator

Question 1: Is the operator you want standardized in ONNX?

Answer:

Yes. Great! It will be straightforward to add support for the missing operator.
No. In this case, it may be difficult to do the work by yourself. Check the Standardization Section.

Question 2: Can the ONNX operator be imported by the backend framework, such as Caffe2?

Answer:

Yes. Terrific. We are able to run the exported ONNX model.
No. In this situation, you can only export model. Please contact the importer (such as onnx-caffe2) developers, as additional work is required.

How to add support to export an operator in PyTorch

Condition 1: If the operator in PyTorch is an ATen operator...

To determine whether the operator is an ATen operator or not, check torch/csrc/autograd/generated/VariableType.h (available within generated code in the PyTorch install dir). If you find the corresponding function in this header file, it's most likely an ATen operator.

Define symbolic functions. In this case, you should obey the following rules.

Define the symbolic function in torch/onnx/symbolic.py. Make sure the function has the same name as the ATen operator/function defined in VariableType.h.
The first parameter is always the exported ONNX graph.
Parameter names must match the names in VariableType.h EXACTLY, because dispatch is done with keyword arguments.
Parameter ordering does NOT necessarily match what is in VariableType.h. Tensors (inputs) are always first, followed by non-tensor arguments.
In the symbolic function, if the target op is already standarized in ONNX, we just need to create a node to represent the ONNX operator in the graph. Here is an example to create a node for the Elu ONNX operator: g.op("Elu", input, alpha_f=_scalar(alpha)). More details are included in API section.
If the input argument is a tensor, but ONNX asks for a scalar, we have to explicitly do the conversion. The helper function, _scalar, can convert a scalar tensor into a Python scalar, and _if_scalar_type_as can turn a Python scalar into a PyTorch tensor.

In the case of adding support for the operator elu, we can find the following declaration in VariableType.h:

virtual Tensor elu(const Tensor & input, Scalar alpha, bool inplace) const override;

From the above, it can be determined that elu is implemented in the ATen library. So we can define a symbolic function called elu in torch/onnx/symbolic.py, similar to the following:

def elu(g, input, alpha, inplace=False):
    return g.op("Elu", input, alpha_f=_scalar(alpha))

Condition 2: If the operator in PyTorch is not an ATen operator...

If you cannot find the corresponding function in VariableType.h, this means you need to define the symbolic function in the PyTorch Function class. For example, you need to create a symbolic function for operator Dropout in torch/nn/_functions/dropout.py.

Define symbolic functions. To define the symbolic functions for non-ATen operators, the following rules should be obeyed.

Create a symbolic function, named symbolic, in the corresponding Function class.
The first parameter is always the exported ONNX graph.
Parameter names except the first must match the names in forward EXACTLY.
The output tuple size must match the outputs of forward.
In the symbolic function, if the target op is already standarized, we only need to create a node in the graph to represent the ONNX operator. Check the API Section for more details.

Export related APIs in PyTorch

Symbolic functions should be implemented in Python. All of these functions interact with Python methods which are implemented via C++-Python bindings. The interface they provide looks like this:

def operator/symbolic(g, *inputs):
  """
  Modifies Graph (e.g., using "op"), adding the ONNX operations representing
  this PyTorch function, and returning a Value or tuple of Values specifying the
  ONNX outputs whose values correspond to the original PyTorch return values
  of the autograd Function (or None if an output is not supported by ONNX).

  Arguments:
    g (Graph): graph to write the ONNX representation into
    inputs (Value...): list of values representing the variables which contain
        the inputs for this function
  """

class Value(object):
  """Represents an intermediate tensor value computed in ONNX."""
  def type(self):
    """Returns the Type of the value."""

class Type(object):
  def sizes(self):
    """Returns a tuple of ints representing the shape of a tensor this describes."""

class Graph(object):
  def op(self, opname, *inputs, **attrs):
    """
    Create an ONNX operator 'opname', taking 'args' as inputs
    and attributes 'kwargs' and add it to the current graph,
    returning the value representing the single output of this
    operator (see the `outputs` keyword argument for multi-return
    operators).

    The set of operators and the inputs/attributes they take
    is documented at https://github.com/onnx/onnx/blob/main/docs/Operators.md

    Arguments:
        opname (string): The ONNX operator name, e.g., `Abs` or `Add`.
        args (Value...): The inputs to the operator; usually provided
            as arguments to the `symbolic` definition.
        kwargs: The attributes of the ONNX operator, with keys named
            according to the following convention: `alpha_f` indicates
            the `alpha` attribute with type `f`.  The valid type specifiers are
            `f` (float), `i` (int), `s` (string) or `t` (Tensor).  An attribute
            specified with type float accepts either a single float, or a
            list of floats (e.g., you would say `dims_i` for a `dims` attribute
            that takes a list of integers).
        outputs (int, optional):  The number of outputs this operator returns;
            by default an operator is assumed to return a single output.
            If `outputs` is greater than one, this functions returns a tuple
            of output `Value`, representing each output of the ONNX operator
            in positional.
    """

Standardize the operator in ONNX

If there is no appropriate operator in ONNX to translate to, you will have to add it to ONNX (ONNX will reject any operators that it does not understand).

Experimental. If you just need export to work in a one-off case, without getting it into ONNX proper, you can add your operator as an experimental operator.

More ONNX symbolic examples

ATen operators in symbolic.py
Index
Negate
ConstantPadNd

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