Design of a high-level PyTorch ML library

~ 3 min read
by RSP. Published July 29, 2020
Filed under: pytorch, ml, sw, design, opensource

This article is an attempt to think about all the various activities in a deep-learning based ML model development process and to distill those into a high-level functional and object-oriented design library based on the PyTorch framework.

At a high level, the process of ML model development for a single task can be subdivided into the following stages

  1. Data Setup and Feature Preprocessing: perhaps multiple datasets, augmentations,
  2. Model and Objective/Loss Specification: specified in code in PyTorch
  3. Model Training: optimization
  4. Performance Evaluation: performance metrics on validation set, test set

The goals of the new high-level library would be to support and simplify

  1. Model specification: modular ability to combine multiple models like legos
  2. Loss-function specification and tuning: each layer can have different and multiple objectives, can arrive from models themselves
  3. Model deployment tools: quantization, factorization, ONNX etc.
  4. Self-supervised learning and coupled with data augmentation: support for online self-supervised learning, test-time self-supervised learning
  5. Multi-task learning: train on multiple datasets and tasks. Some tasks can share common representations and have task specific branches subsequent to that
  6. Curriculum learning: a teacher (RL agent, perhaps) figures out sequence of tasks and examples within those tasks to learn better representations and/or perform better at tasks
  7. Multi-mode learning: when inputs are from two or more different domains (like audio, sensors, video, images, etc.) and ability to share/relate representations of same object
  8. ML model debugging: feature attribution, hard examples, out-of-domain indicators
  9. Model report card

Let’s take all of these goals and then try to create an example that allow easy use and expression of high-level ideas quickly.

High-level example using JumpML library

import jumpml
import torch.optim as optim

# datasetFile defines
#         multiple datasets, train, test, validation splits
#         feature processing pipelines (could include pretrained models themselves)
#         transformations and augmentations
#         curriculum learning options
dataloader = jumpml.createDataloader(datasetFile)

# modelFile defines
#          pytorch modules and connections
#          objective functions at/between layers/nodes
model = jumpml.loadModel(modelFile)

# define optimizer as usual.
optimizer = optim.SGD(model.parameters(), lr=learning_rate, momentum=0.5)

# Create Learner based on learnerOptions
#          initialization, EMA parameters, EWC, parameter saving
#          self-supervised learning phases
#          curriculum learning based on learning
#          dynamic model augmentation: adding more capacity or branches dynamically
#         logging learning progress
learner = jumpml.createLearner(dataloader, model, optimizer, learnerOptions)

# Self-supervised phase
learner.ssLearn()

# Supervised Learning Phase: perhaps trains only the task-specific layers... may be does some multi-task learning on some other layers.
for epochs in range(numEpochs):
    learner.trainEpoch()  # this could only impact the classifier branches


# Evaluation
# evalMetrics are a list of functions.
# each function takes model predictions, ground truth and calculates metrics
evalResults = jumpml.evalModel(dataloader, model, evalMetrics)

# Reports, visualization, deployment
# may run a separate distillation loop (quantization, factorization, onnx exporting)
jumpml.deployModel(evalResults, model, deploymentConfig)
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