PyTorch Natural Language Processing Project Template

This repository is mainly build upon victoresque's repository, which is a perfect project for computer vision tasks. However, it was lacking configuration for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, which are obviuosly different from computer vision or time series tasks.

There have been many great NLP frameworks published in last years e.g. AllenNLP, fasttext, torchtext, fastai, pytorch-nlp etc.However, this brought a big complexity and chaos in selection and usage of these frameworks. They all have advantages and disadvantages against each other. One may not easily exploit them together easily and has to make a decision. In this project, I aim to provide a low level project structure in which any of these frameworks' advantages can be exploited easily. For example, in the sample project I used Glove Embeddings by using pytorch-nlp, and what I needed was just to write a simple wrapper class.

Please enjoy and any feedback is welcomed!!!

• PyTorch NLP Project Tremplate
  • Requirements
  • Features
  • Folder Structure
  • Usage
    • Config file format
    • Using config files
    • Resuming from checkpoints
  • Using Multiple GPU
  • Customization
    • Custom CLI options
    • Data Loader
    • Trainer
    • Embedding
    • Model
    • Loss and metrics
      • Multiple metrics
    • Additional logging
    • Validation data
    • Checkpoints
  • TensorboardX Visualization
  • Contributing
  • TODOs
  • License
  • Acknowledgments

Requirements

• Python >= 3.5
• PyTorch >= 1.0.1.post2
• PyTorch-NLP >= 0.3.7.post1
• tqdm (Optional for test.py)
• tensorboard >= 1.13.1 (Optional for TensorboardX)
• tensorboardX >= 1.6 (Optional for TensorboardX)

Features

• Clear folder structure which is suitable for Natural Language Processing project.
• .json config file support for convenient parameter tuning.
• Ability to make use of different NLP frameworks as well as custom methods
• Customizable command line options for more convenient parameter tuning.
• Checkpoint saving and resuming.
• Abstract base classes for faster development:
  • BaseTrainer handles checkpoint saving/resuming, training process logging, and more.
  • BaseDataLoader handles batch generation, data shuffling, and validation data splitting.
  • BaseModel provides basic model summary.
  • BaseEmbedding handles Embedding #TODO

Folder Structure

pytorch-nlp-project-template/
│
├── train.py - main script to start training
├── test.py - evaluation of trained model
│
│
├── config.json - holds configuration for training
├── parse_config.py - class to handle config file and cli options
│
├── new_project.py - initialize new project with template files
│
├── base/ - abstract base classes
│   ├── base_embedding.py
│   ├── base_data_loader.py
│   ├── base_model.py
│   └── base_trainer.py
│  
│
├── data_loader/ - anything about data loading goes here
│   └── data_loaders.py
│
├── data/ - default directory for storing input data
│
│
├── datasets/ - datasets that will be used in dataloaders
│
│
├── model/ - models, losses, and metrics
│   ├── model.py
│   ├── metric.py
│   └── loss.py
│
│
├──embedding/ - embeddings (custom or pretrained any transformer)
│   └── embedding.py
│
├── saved/
│   ├── models/ - trained models are saved here
│   └── log/ - default logdir for tensorboardX and logging output
│
├── trainer/ - trainers
│   └── trainer.py
│
├── logger/ - module for tensorboardX visualization and logging
│   ├── visualization.py
│   ├── logger.py
│   └── logger_config.json
│  
└── utils/ - small utility functions
│   ├── util.py
│   ├── vocab.py
│   └── ...

Usage

The code in this repo is a Language Modelling example with Rick and Morty Episodes data for NLP project template inspired from this medium post. Try python train.py -c config.json to run code.

Config file format

Config files are in .json format:

{
  "name": "Rick_And_Morty",
  "n_gpu": 1,
  "embedding": {
    "type": "GloveEmbedding",
    "args": {
      "name": "6B",
      "dim": 100
    }
  },
  "arch": {
    "type": "MortyFire",
    "args": {
      "lstm_size": 256,
      "seq_length": 20,
      "num_layers": 2,
      "lstm_dropout": 0.3,
      "fc_dropout": 0.3
    }
  },
  "data_loader": {
    "type": "RickAndMortyDataLoader",
    "args": {
      "data_dir": "data/rick_and_morty",
      "seq_length": 20,
      "vocab_size": 1000,
      "batch_size": 256,
      "shuffle": true,
      "validation_split": 0.2
    }
  },
  "optimizer": {
    "type": "Adam",
    "args": {
      "lr": 0.001,
      "weight_decay": 0,
      "amsgrad": true
    }
  },
  "loss": "cross_entropy",
  "metrics": [
    "accuracy"
  ],
  "lr_scheduler": {
    "type": "StepLR",
    "args": {
      "step_size": 50,
      "gamma": 0.1
    }
  },
  "trainer": {
    "epochs": 20,
    "save_dir": "saved/",
    "save_period": 1,
    "verbosity": 2,
    "monitor": "min val_loss",
    "early_stop": 10,
    "tensorboardX": true
  }
}

Add addional configurations if you need.

Using config files

Modify the configurations in .json config files, then run:

python train.py --config config.json

Resuming from checkpoints

You can resume from a previously saved checkpoint by:

python train.py --resume path/to/checkpoint

Using Multiple GPU

You can enable multi-GPU training by setting n_gpu argument of the config file to larger number. If configured to use smaller number of gpu than available, first n devices will be used by default. Specify indices of available GPUs by cuda environmental variable.

python train.py --device 2,3 -c config.json

This is equivalent to

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=2,3 python train.py -c config.py

Customization

Project initialization

Use the new_project.py script to make your new project directory with template files. python new_project.py ../NewProject then a new project folder named 'NewProject' will be made. This script will filter out unneccessary files like cache, git files or readme file.

Custom CLI options

Changing values of config file is a clean, safe and easy way of tuning hyperparameters. However, sometimes it is better to have command line options if some values need to be changed too often or quickly.

This template uses the configurations stored in the json file by default, but by registering custom options as follows you can change some of them using CLI flags.

# simple class-like object having 3 attributes, `flags`, `type`, `target`.
CustomArgs = collections.namedtuple('CustomArgs', 'flags type target')
options = [
    CustomArgs(['--lr', '--learning_rate'], type=float, target=('optimizer', 'args', 'lr')),
    CustomArgs(['--bs', '--batch_size'], type=int, target=('data_loader', 'args', 'batch_size'))
    # options added here can be modified by command line flags.
]

target argument should be sequence of keys, which are used to access that option in the config dict. In this example, target for the learning rate option is ('optimizer', 'args', 'lr') because config['optimizer']['args']['lr'] points to the learning rate. python train.py -c config.json --bs 256 runs training with options given in config.json except for the batch size which is increased to 256 by command line options.

Data Loader

• Writing your own data loader

1. Inherit BaseDataLoader

   BaseDataLoader is a subclass of torch.utils.data.DataLoader, you can use either of them.

   BaseDataLoader handles:

   • Generating next batch
   • Data shuffling
   • Generating validation data loader by calling BaseDataLoader.split_validation()

• DataLoader Usage

  BaseDataLoader is an iterator, to iterate through batches:

  for batch_idx, (x_batch, y_batch) in data_loader:
      pass
  

• Example

  Please refer to data_loader/data_loaders.py for an MNIST data loading example.

Trainer

• Writing your own trainer

1. Inherit BaseTrainer

   BaseTrainer handles:

   • Training process logging
   • Checkpoint saving
   • Checkpoint resuming
   • Reconfigurable performance monitoring for saving current best model, and early stop training.
     • If config monitor is set to max val_accuracy, which means then the trainer will save a checkpoint model_best.pth when validation accuracy of epoch replaces current maximum.
     • If config early_stop is set, training will be automatically terminated when model performance does not improve for given number of epochs. This feature can be turned off by passing 0 to the early_stop option, or just deleting the line of config.

2. Implementing abstract methods

   You need to implement _train_epoch() for your training process, if you need validation then you can implement _valid_epoch() as in trainer/trainer.py

• Example

  Please refer to trainer/trainer.py for MNIST training.

Embedding

• Writing your own model

1. Inherit BaseModel

   BaseEmbedding handles:

   • Inherited from torch.nn.Module
   • __str__: Modify native print function to prints the number of trainable parameters.

2. Implementing abstract methods

   TODO Implement the foward pass method forward()

• Example

  Please refer to embedding/embedding.py for a LeNet example.

Model

• Writing your own model

1. Inherit BaseModel

   BaseModel handles:

   • Inherited from torch.nn.Module
   • __str__: Modify native print function to prints the number of trainable parameters.

2. Implementing abstract methods

   Implement the foward pass method forward()

• Example

  Please refer to model/model.py for a LeNet example.

Loss

Custom loss functions can be implemented in 'model/loss.py'. Use them by changing the name given in "loss" in config file, to corresponding name.

Metrics

Metric functions are located in 'model/metric.py'.

You can monitor multiple metrics by providing a list in the configuration file, e.g.:

"metrics": ["my_metric", "my_metric2"],

Additional logging

If you have additional information to be logged, in _train_epoch() of your trainer class, merge them with log as shown below before returning:

additional_log = {"gradient_norm": g, "sensitivity": s}
log = {**log, **additional_log}
return log

Testing

You can test trained model by running test.py passing path to the trained checkpoint by --resume argument.

  python test.py --resume path/to/checkpoint.pth

Validation data

In case the validation data is not provided in the dataset, you may use the split_validation() from BaseDataLoader class. Otherwise, you need to specify the path to the validation dataset and do necessary configuration in trained.py.

To split validation data from a data loader, call BaseDataLoader.split_validation(), then it will return a data loader for validation of size specified in your config file. The validation_split can be a ratio of validation set per total data(0.0 <= float < 1.0), or the number of samples (0 <= int < n_total_samples).

Note: the split_validation() method will modify the original data loader Note: split_validation() will return None if "validation_split" is set to 0

Checkpoints

You can specify the name of the training session in config files:

"name": "Rick_And_Morty",

The checkpoints will be saved in save_dir/name/timestamp/checkpoint_epoch_n, with timestamp in mmdd_HHMMSS format.

A copy of config file will be saved in the same folder.

Note: checkpoints contain:

{
  'arch': arch,
  'epoch': epoch,
  'state_dict': self.model.state_dict(),
  'optimizer': self.optimizer.state_dict(),
  'monitor_best': self.mnt_best,
  'config': self.config
}

TensorboardX Visualization

This template supports TensorboardX visualization.

• TensorboardX Usage

1. Install

   Follow installation guide in TensorboardX.

2. Run training

   Set tensorboardX option in config file true.

3. Open tensorboard server

   Type tensorboard --logdir saved/log/ at the project root, then server will open at http://localhost:6006

By default, values of loss and metrics specified in config file, input images, and histogram of model parameters will be logged. If you need more visualizations, use add_scalar('tag', data), etc in the trainer._train_epoch method. add_something() methods in this template are basically wrappers for those of tensorboardX.SummaryWriter module.

Note: You don't have to specify current steps, since WriterTensorboardX class defined at logger/visualization.py will track current steps.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute any kind of function or enhancement, here the coding style follows PEP8

Code should pass the Flake8 check before committing.

TODOs

• Creating one architecture in which embedding and model are called
• Iteration-based training (instead of epoch-based)
• Multiple optimizers
• Configurable logging layout, checkpoint naming
• visdom logger support

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more details

Acknowledgments

This project is inspired by the project Pytorch-Template by victorresque

Some Other Repositories worth to mention

• fastai
• AllenNLP