[Feature Request]: Rename inputs/outputs

[pvardanis]

Request Description

It would be nice we have support for renaming inputs/outputs on the IR graph similarly as ONNX does. Any specific reason why's this not available as of now?

Feature Use Case

No response

Issue submission checklist

• The feature request or improvement must be related to OpenVINO

[rkazants]

Hi @pvardanis,

The requested functionality is really questionable. Can you please elaborate your request: what are real use cases, usage frequency? How is it important if user can just manually modify IR by editing .xml file (just replace names attribute for Parameter node)? However, be cautioned that model can be corrupted in case conflicting tensor names after this modification. That is one of the reason to be careful with implementing such functionality.

We always chase alignment with original frameworks: preserving original input/output tensor names, out-of-the-box experience for inference (without any model modification). We take the most important functionality to our API that influence performance, easy transfer from original framework to OpenVINO. In the meantime, we don't overload our API with new methods that are questionable. It must be reasonable and proved.

Best regards,
Roman

[rkazants]

Hi @pvardanis,

Please ignore my previous message. Apologize, I was mistaken about absence of functionality for setting input names.

In C++ ov::Output<ov::Node> representing tensor provides a method set_names() to set a new name: https://github.com/openvinotoolkit/openvino/blob/master/src/core/include/openvino/core/node_output.hpp#L86

Your code will look like as follows:

    std::shared_ptr<ov::Model> ov_model = ...;
    auto some_input = ov_model->input("old_name");
    some_input.set_names({"new_name"});

    // inference code ...

I think you can do the same trick for compiled model ov::CompiledModel.

Unfortunately, we have no such method for Output in Python API. I will ask my colleagues to add it asap.
@mlukasze, please align Python API for Output with C++, now it misses setters like set_names().

Thanks to @ilya-lavrenov for advice and catch-up.

Best regards,
Roman