# jax.numpy.vectorize¶

jax.numpy.vectorize(pyfunc, *, excluded=frozenset({}), signature=None)[source]

Define a vectorized function with broadcasting.

vectorize() is a convenience wrapper for defining vectorized functions with broadcasting, in the style of NumPy’s generalized universal functions. It allows for defining functions that are automatically repeated across any leading dimensions, without the implementation of the function needing to be concerned about how to handle higher dimensional inputs.

jax.numpy.vectorize() has the same interface as numpy.vectorize, but it is syntactic sugar for an auto-batching transformation (vmap()) rather than a Python loop. This should be considerably more efficient, but the implementation must be written in terms of functions that act on JAX arrays.

Parameters
• pyfunc – function to vectorize.

• excluded – optional set of integers representing positional arguments for which the function will not be vectorized. These will be passed directly to pyfunc unmodified.

• signature – optional generalized universal function signature, e.g., (m,n),(n)->(m) for vectorized matrix-vector multiplication. If provided, pyfunc will be called with (and expected to return) arrays with shapes given by the size of corresponding core dimensions. By default, pyfunc is assumed to take scalars arrays as input and output.

Returns

Vectorized version of the given function.

Here a few examples of how one could write vectorized linear algebra routines using vectorize():

import jax.numpy as jnp
from functools import partial

@partial(jnp.vectorize, signature='(k),(k)->(k)')
def cross_product(a, b):
assert a.shape == b.shape and a.ndim == b.ndim == 1
return jnp.array([a[1] * b[2] - a[2] * b[1],
a[2] * b[0] - a[0] * b[2],
a[0] * b[1] - a[1] * b[0]])

@partial(jnp.vectorize, signature='(n,m),(m)->(n)')
def matrix_vector_product(matrix, vector):
assert matrix.ndim == 2 and matrix.shape[1:] == vector.shape
return matrix @ vector


These functions are only written to handle 1D or 2D arrays (the assert statements will never be violated), but with vectorize they support arbitrary dimensional inputs with NumPy style broadcasting, e.g.,

>>> cross_product(jnp.ones(3), jnp.ones(3)).shape
(3,)
>>> cross_product(jnp.ones((2, 3)), jnp.ones(3)).shape
(2, 3)
>>> cross_product(jnp.ones((1, 2, 3)), jnp.ones((2, 1, 3))).shape
(2, 2, 3)
>>> matrix_vector_product(jnp.ones(3), jnp.ones(3))
ValueError: input with shape (3,) does not have enough dimensions for all
core dimensions ('n', 'k') on vectorized function with excluded=frozenset()
and signature='(n,k),(k)->(k)'
>>> matrix_vector_product(jnp.ones((2, 3)), jnp.ones(3)).shape
(2,)
>>> matrix_vector_product(jnp.ones((2, 3)), jnp.ones((4, 3))).shape
(4, 2)  # not the same as jnp.matmul