We had discussion before regarding whether to put layout as part of type system. At the time the conclusion was not to complicate type, but have layout a separate property during the layout inference pass. Part of the reasons is layout is not a must have, and is not quite well-defined, e.g., why the name “NCHW” but not “ABCD”. but maybe we shall expose an API to allow users get the inferred layout after running layout inference pass.
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