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An ML research template with good documentation by Boyuan Chen, an MIT PhD student

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Project Instructions

[Write your project-specific instructions here]

If you find this research template helpful to you, please cite us as

@misc{chen2024diffusionforcingnexttokenprediction,
      title={Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion},
      author={Boyuan Chen and Diego Marti Monso and Yilun Du and Max Simchowitz and Russ Tedrake and Vincent Sitzmann},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2407.01392},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.LG},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01392},
}

Infra instructions

This repo is using Boyuan Chen's research template repo. By its license, we just ask you to keep the above sentence and links in README.md and the LICENSE file to credit the author.

All experiments can be launched via python -m main +name=xxxx {options} where you can find more details later in this article.

For slurm clusters, we provide an extremely useful utility to help you run programs without engineering command or writing bash scripts. e.g. for mit_vision cluster, you can simply run python -m main {options} cluster=mit_vision on login node. It will automatically generate slurm scripts and run them for you on a compute node. You can append options like cluster.params.num_gpus=8 to command (see more in configuration/cluster/base_slurm.yaml) to change resources. It's also easy to add your own slurm by following the Add slurm clusters section.

Setup

Run conda create python=3.10 -n {your_env_name} to create environment. Run conda activate {your_env_name} to activate this environment. Run pip install -r requirements.txt to install all dependencies.

Sign up a wandb account for cloud logging and checkpointing. In command line, run wandb login to login.

Then modify the wandb entity (account) in configurations/config.yaml.

If using VScode, we recommend installing Black Formatter for consistent auto-formatting with the original code.

Run built-in example

Run an example machine-learning experiment with a specified dataset and algorithm: python -m main +name=xxxx experiment=example_classification dataset=example_cifar10 algorithm=example_classifier

The files associated with this example are:

  • algorithms/examples/classifier/classifier.py
  • configurations/algorithm/example_classifier.yaml
  • datasets/example_classification/cifar10.py
  • configurations/dataset/example_cifar10.yaml
  • experiments/example_classification.py
  • configurations/experiment/example_classification.yaml

Run a generic example experiment (not necessarily ML): python -m main +name=yyyy experiment=hello_world algorithm=hello_algo1

The files associated with this example are:

  • algorithms/examples/helloworld/example_algos.py
  • configurations/algorithm/example_helloworld_1.yaml
  • experiments/example_helloworld.py
  • configurations/experiment/example_helloworld.yaml

Run a generic example experiment, with different algorithm: python -m main +name=zzzz experiment=hello_world algorithm=hello_algo2

  • algorithms/examples/helloworld/example_algos.py
  • configurations/algorithm/example_helloworld_2.yaml
  • experiments/example_helloworld.py
  • configurations/experiment/example_helloworld.yaml

Modify for your own project

First, create a new repository with this template. Make sure the new repository has the name you want to use for wandb logging.

Add your method and baselines in algorithms following the algorithms/README.md as well as the example code in algorithms/examples/classifier/classifier.py. An algorithm defines both the model and training loop, but we simplified many things for you: For pytorch experiments, write your algorithm as a pytorch lightning pl.LightningModule which has extensive documentation. For a quick start, read "Define a LightningModule" in this link. Finally, add a yaml config file to configurations/algorithm imitating that of configurations/algorithm/example_classifier.yaml, for each algorithm you added.

(If doing machine learning) Add your dataset in datasets following the datasets/README.md as well as the example code in datasets/classification.py. Finally, add a yaml config file to configurations/dataset imitating that of configurations/dataset/example_cifar10.yaml, for each dataset you added.

Add your experiment in experiments following the experiments/README.md or following the example code in experiments/exp_classification.py. Then register your experiment in experiments/__init__.py. Usually, an experiment is just a registration of algorithms and datasets so your definition would be very short if you inherit the base class. A training_step is not defined via experiments but via algorithms instead. Finally, add a yaml config file to configurations/experiment imitating that of configurations/experiment/example_classification.yaml, for each experiment you added.

Modify configurations/config.yaml to set algorithm to the yaml file you want to use in configurations/algorithm; set experiment to the yaml file you want to use in configurations/experiment; set dataset to the yaml file you want to use in configurations/dataset, or to null if no dataset is needed; Notice the fields should not contain the .yaml suffix.

You are all set!

cd into your project root. Now you can launch your new experiment with python main.py +name=example_name. You can run baselines or different datasets by add arguments like algorithm=xxx or dataset=xxx. You can also override any yaml configurations by following the next section.

One special note, if your want to define a new task for your experiment, (e.g. other than training and test) you can define it as a method in your experiment class (e.g. the main task in experiments/example_helloworld.py) and use experiment.tasks=[task_name] to run it. Let's say you have a generate_dataset task before the task training and you implemented it in experiment class, you can then run python -m main +name xxxx experiment.tasks=[generate_dataset,training] to execute it before training.

Pass in arguments

We use hydra instead of argparse to configure arguments at every code level. You can both write a static config in configuration folder or, at runtime, override part of yur static config with command line arguments.

For example, arguments algorithm=example_classifier experiment.lr=1e-3 will override the lr variable in configurations/experiment/example_classifier.yaml. The argument wandb.mode will override the mode under wandb namesspace in the file configurations/config.yaml.

All static config and runtime override will be logged to cloud automatically.

Resume a checkpoint & logging

For machine learning experiments, all checkpoints and logs are logged to cloud automatically so you can resume them on another server. Simply append resume={wandb_run_id} to your command line arguments to resume it. The run_id can be founded in a url of a wandb run in wandb dashboard. By default, latest checkpoint in a run is stored indefinitely and earlier checkpoints in the run will be deleted after 5 days to save your storage.

On the other hand, sometimes you may want to start a new run with different run id but still load a prior ckpt. This can be done by setting the load={wandb_run_id / ckpt path} flag.

Load a checkpoint to eval

The argument experiment.tasks=[task_name1,task_name2] (note the [] brackets here needed) allows to select a sequence of tasks to execute, such as training, validation and test. Therefore, for testing a machine learning ckpt, you may run python -m main load={your_wandb_run_id} experiment.tasks=[test].

More generally, the task names are the corresponding method names of your experiment class. For BaseLightningExperiment, we already defined three methods training, validation and test for you, but you can also define your own tasks by creating methods to your experiment class under intended task names.

Debug

We provide a useful debug flag which you can enable by python main.py debug=True. This will enable numerical error tracking as well as setting cfg.debug to True for your experiments, algorithms and datasets class. However, this debug flag will make ML code very slow as it automatically tracks all parameter / gradients!

Hyperparameter Sweep

Launch hyperparameter sweep via: wandb sweep configurations/sweep/example_sweep.yaml Then, launch sweep agents on different servers by running the command printed by the controller (e.g., wandb agent <agent_id>).

Add slurm clusters

If you are from an academic institute, feel free to create a pull request to add your school's cluster to our repo.

It's very easy to add your own slurm clusters via adding a yaml file in configurations/cluster. You can take a look at configurations/cluster/mit_vision.yaml for example. For multi-node training, configurations/cluster/harvard_fas.yaml is a good example. Some cluster has extra security and has login node offline, such as mit supercloud, the script will still automatically sync wandb logging to cloud with <1min latency if you set one flags following configurations/cluster/mit_supercloud.yaml.

Feature Roadmap

Features This repo
README level documentation ✔️
Examples (ML & Non ML) ✔️
Cloud checkpoint save / load ✔️
Cloud logging ✔️
Hyper-parameter logging ✔️
Static yaml configuration ✔️
Yaml config override by arugment ✔️
Submit UI for MIT cluster ✔️
Distributed training ✔️
Low precision training ✔️
Distributed hyper-parameter sweep ✔️
Debug mode ✔️
PEP 8 Style ✔️
Type hints ✔️
Wiki style documentation
Unit test

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An ML research template with good documentation by Boyuan Chen, an MIT PhD student

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