The AdamOptimizer class creates additional variables, called “slots”, to hold values for the “m” and “v” accumulators.
See the source here if you’re curious, it’s actually quite readable:
https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/blob/master/tensorflow/python/training/adam.py#L39 . Other optimizers, such as Momentum and Adagrad use slots too.
These variables must be initialized before you can train a model.
The normal way to initialize variables is to call tf.initialize_all_variables() which adds ops to initialize the variables present in the graph when it is called.
(Aside: unlike its name suggests, initialize_all_variables() does not initialize anything, it only add ops that will initialize the variables when run.)
What you must do is call initialize_all_variables() after you have added the optimizer:
...build your model...
# Add the optimizer
train_op = tf.train.AdamOptimizer(1e-4).minimize(cross_entropy)
# Add the ops to initialize variables. These will include
# the optimizer slots added by AdamOptimizer().
init_op = tf.initialize_all_variables()
# launch the graph in a session
sess = tf.Session()
# Actually intialize the variables
sess.run(init_op)
# now train your model
for ...:
sess.run(train_op)