Command Line OptionsΒΆ

All programs using DyNet have a few command line options. These must be specified at the very beginning of the command line, before other options.

  • --dynet-mem NUMBER: DyNet runs by default with 512MB of memory, which is split evenly for the forward and backward steps, as well as parameter storage. This will be expanded automatically every time one of the pools runs out of memory. By setting NUMBER here, DyNet will allocate more memory immediately at the initialization stage. Note that you can also individually set the amount of memory for forward calculation, backward calculation, and parameters by using comma separated variables --dynet-mem FOR,BACK,PARAM. This is useful if, for example, you are performing testing and don’t need to allocate any memory for backward calculation.
  • --dynet-weight-decay NUMBER: Adds weight decay to the parameters, which modifies each parameter w such that w *= (1-weight_decay) after every update. This is similar to L2 regularization, but different in a couple ways, which are noted in detail in the “Unorthodox Design” section.
  • --dynet-gpus NUMBER: Specify how many GPUs you want to use, if DyNet is compiled with CUDA. Currently, only one GPU is supported.
  • --dynet-gpu-ids X,Y,Z: Specify the GPUs that you want to use by device ID. Currently only one GPU is supported, but if you use this command you can select which one to use.