What is the difference between ‘SAME’ and ‘VALID’ padding in tf.nn.max_pool of tensorflow?

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I’ll give an example to make it clearer:

  • x: input image of shape [2, 3], 1 channel
  • valid_pad: max pool with 2×2 kernel, stride 2 and VALID padding.
  • same_pad: max pool with 2×2 kernel, stride 2 and SAME padding (this is the classic way to go)

The output shapes are:

  • valid_pad: here, no padding so the output shape is [1, 1]
  • same_pad: here, we pad the image to the shape [2, 4] (with -inf and then apply max pool), so the output shape is [1, 2]
x = tf.constant([[1., 2., 3.],
                 [4., 5., 6.]])

x = tf.reshape(x, [1, 2, 3, 1])  # give a shape accepted by tf.nn.max_pool

valid_pad = tf.nn.max_pool(x, [1, 2, 2, 1], [1, 2, 2, 1], padding='VALID')
same_pad = tf.nn.max_pool(x, [1, 2, 2, 1], [1, 2, 2, 1], padding='SAME')

valid_pad.get_shape() == [1, 1, 1, 1]  # valid_pad is [5.]
same_pad.get_shape() == [1, 1, 2, 1]   # same_pad is  [5., 6.]

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