How to customize Keras layer names and also have it automatically increment layer.name

Below should do:

def custom_activation(x):
    return (K.sigmoid(x) * 5) - 1

class CustSig(Layer):
    def __init__(self, my_activation, **kwargs):
        super(CustSig, self).__init__(**kwargs)
        self.supports_masking = True
        self.activation = my_activation

    def call(self, inputs):
        return self.activation(inputs)

    def get_config(self):
        config = {'activation': activations.serialize(self.activation)}
        base_config = super(Activation, self).get_config()
        return dict(list(base_config.items()) + list(config.items()))

    def compute_output_shape(self, input_shape):
        return input_shape

From source code, automatic naming works as follows:

if not name:
  self._name = backend.unique_object_name(
      generic_utils.to_snake_case(self.__class__.__name__),
      zero_based=zero_based)
else:
  self._name = name

The Keras graph is checked for existing objects with the same name as the object you're defining - if any exist, continues to increment by 1 until none match. The catch is, you cannot specify name=, as that eliminates automatic naming per above conditional.

The only workaround is likely defining your own custom activation layer using desired name as class name as above, which manifests itself as follows:

ipt = Input(shape=(1, 3, 256), name='spec')
x   = Flatten('channels_last')(ipt)
for _ in range(3):
    x   = Dense(512)(x)
    x   = CustSig(custom_activation)(x)
out = Dense(256, activation='sigmoid', name='out')(x)

model = Model(ipt, out)

print(model.layers[3].name)
print(model.layers[5].name)
print(model.layers[7].name)

cust_sig
cust_sig_1
cust_sig_2

If you check the source code of Layer class, you can find these lines that decide the name of layer.

if not name:
    prefix = self.__class__.__name__
    name = _to_snake_case(prefix) + '_' + str(K.get_uid(prefix))
self.name = name

K.get_uid(prefix) will get the unique id from the graph, that's why you see activation_1, activation_2.

If you want to have the same effect on your customized activation function, a better way is to define your own class which inherits from Layer.

class MyAct(Layer):
    def __init__(self):
        super().__init__()

    def call(self, inputs):
        return (K.sigmoid(inputs) * 5) - 1 

spec_input = Input(shape=(10,10))
x = Flatten()(spec_input)
for layer in range(3):
    x = Dense(512)(x)
    x = MyAct()(x)

model = Model(spec_input, x)
model.summary()

Output

# Layer (type)                 Output Shape              Param #   
# =================================================================
# input_1 (InputLayer)         (None, 10, 10)            0         
# _________________________________________________________________
# flatten_1 (Flatten)          (None, 100)               0         
# _________________________________________________________________
# dense_1 (Dense)              (None, 512)               51712     
# _________________________________________________________________
# my_act_1 (MyAct)             (None, 512)               0         
# _________________________________________________________________
# dense_2 (Dense)              (None, 512)               262656    
# _________________________________________________________________
# my_act_2 (MyAct)             (None, 512)               0         
# _________________________________________________________________
# dense_3 (Dense)              (None, 512)               262656    
# _________________________________________________________________
# my_act_3 (MyAct)             (None, 512)               0         
# =================================================================
# Total params: 577,024
# Trainable params: 577,024
# Non-trainable params: 0

If you want to use a specific_name multiple times with number suffix, use this:

tf.get_default_graph().unique_name("specific_name")

or

tf.compat.v1.get_default_graph().unique_name("specific_name")

In your case:

...
for layer in range(3):
  x = Dense(512)(x)
  x = Activation('custom_activation', name=tf.get_default_graph().unique_name("cust_sig"))(x)
...