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What is a Dense Tensor?

A standard multidimensional array storing all elements in memory, providing fast sequential access but consuming significant storage at large scale

by Databricks Staff

  • A dense tensor is a multi dimensional array where most elements are nonzero and are stored explicitly in memory.
  • Dense tensors are commonly used in numerical computing and deep learning to represent data such as images, time series and intermediate model activations.
  • Libraries and frameworks optimize operations on dense tensors so models can train and run efficiently on CPUs and accelerators.

Dense tensors store values in a contiguous sequential block of memory where all values are represented. Tensors or multi-dimensional arrays are used in a diverse set of multi-dimensional data analysis applications. There are a number of software products that can perform tensor computations, such as the MATLAB suite that has even been enhanced by various open source third party toolboxes. MATLAB alone is capable of supporting a variety of element-wise and binary dense tensor operations A dense layer is a fully connected layer, as each and every neuron gets an input from all the neurons in the previous layer, thus being densely connected. This means that every Neuron in a Dense layer will be fully connected to every Neuron in the prior layer. Dense Tensor Layers Dense is usually used towards the end of a network, and sometimes multiple times. Trying to build a layered infrastructure for high-performance dense tensor applications, one of the most used libraries is dten, which is known for storing and manipulating dense tensors. The library focuses on storing dense tensors in canonical storage formats and converting between storage formats in parallel. In addition, it supports tensor matricization in different ways. The library is general-purpose and provides a high degree of flexibility. We may regard a tensor as the multidimensional generalization of a matrix. Mathematically, matricization is merely a conceptual (or logical) restructuring of the tensor.

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