Can Keras with Tensorflow backend be forced to use CPU or GPU at will?

I have Keras installed with the Tensorflow backend and CUDA. I’d like to sometimes on demand force Keras to use CPU. Can this be done without say installing a separate CPU-only Tensorflow in a virtual environment? If so how? If the backend were Theano, the flags could be set, but I have not heard of Tensorflow flags accessible via Keras.

Numpy to TFrecords: Is there a more simple way to handle batch inputs from tfrecords?

My question is about how to get batch inputs from multiple (or sharded) tfrecords. I’ve read the example https://github.com/tensorflow/models/blob/master/inception/inception/image_processing.py#L410. The basic pipeline is, take the training set as as example, (1) first generate a series of tfrecords (e.g., train-000-of-005, train-001-of-005, …), (2) from these filenames, generate a list and fed them into the tf.train.string_input_producer to get a queue, (3) simultaneously generate a tf.RandomShuffleQueue to do other stuff, (4) using tf.train.batch_join to generate batch inputs.

How to set layer-wise learning rate in Tensorflow?

I am wondering if there is a way that I can use different learning rate for different layers like what is in Caffe. I am trying to modify a pre-trained model and use it for other tasks. What I want is to speed up the training for new added layers and keep the trained layers at low learning rate in order to prevent them from being distorted. for example, I have a 5-conv-layer pre-trained model. Now I add a new conv layer and fine tune it. The first 5 layers would have learning rate of 0.00001 and the last one would have 0.001. Any idea how to achieve this?