Infrastructure and Tooling for Deep Learning

 Today's presentation continues our sweep through some of the Full Stack Deep Learning lectures from their spring 2021 course.  This one is an overview and more detailed breakdown of the various components of machine learning tools and infrastructure.  So software, compute hardware options, resource management, frameworks, distributed training, experiment management, hyper-parameter tuning.

I had to puzzle a lot of this stuff out with a ton of web searching and puzzlement, so seeing it all explained in one place is a great resource.  The full stack course really tries to cover the nuts and bolts of everything you might need to get up to speed on for working with deep learning projects.


Observations

1:  They discuss Visual Studio Code early on.  If you are looking for a good Python coding environment i think it is a good choice.

2:  Streamlit was new to me, but sounds interesting.  Especially the part about easy ways to build interactive applets from your Python code.

3:  PyTorch Lightning once again is mentioned as a great solution.  Which is what we thought when we did the second deep learning course here at HTC.

One thing to be aware of about the fastai wrapper sitting on top of PyTorch is that fastai 2.0 does not fully support the TorchScript to c code pipeline.  It is also very unclear what is going on with fastai development moving forward (which was not the case last year when we put together the first HTC deep learning course), while PyTorch Lightning seems to be charging ahead.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CycleGAN: a GAN architecture for learning unpaired image to image transformations

Image
 Like the Doublemint Twins touting the joys of Doublemint gum, 2 GANs are surely better than 1 GAN.  Especially if we package them together inside of one meta GAN module.  And this is exactly what the CycleGAN architecture does. Have you ever harbored dark secrets of turning a horse into a zebra?  The CycleGAN was developed to do just that. Learn how to turn a horse into a zebra.  And more. Now right away you can notice a difference between the image to image transformation GAN architectures we've been discussing over the last few posts.  Those last few posts described systems that learn from a database of matched input-output image pairs. And if your goal is to turn an edge representation into a nicely filled in continuous tone image, it's easy to build your database of matched input-output image pairs that your GAN system can then learn off of.  Take a continuous tone image (which will be the output of the database pair entry), then run it through an edge detector algorithm. 
Read more

Pix2Pix: a GAN architecture for image to image transformation

Image
 I thought following up yesterday's TraVelGAN post with a Pix2Pix GAN post would be useful to compare what is going on in the 2 architectures.  Two different approaches to the same problem. I stole this Pix2Pix Overview slide below from an excellent deeplearning.ai GAN course (note that they borrowed it from the original paper) because it gives you a good feel for what is going on inside of the Pix2Pix architecture.    Note how the Generator part is very much like an auto-encoder architecture, but rebuilt using the U-Net architecture features (based on skip-connections) that fastai has been discussing in their courses for several years before it became more widely known to the deep learning community at large  (and which originally came from an obscure medical image segmentation paper) . So the Generator in this Pix2Pix GAN is really pretty sophisticated, consisting of a whole image to image auto-encoder network with U-Net skip connections to generate better image quality at highe
Read more

Smart Fabrics

Image
"What makes smart fabrics revolutionary is that they have the ability to do many things that traditional fabrics cannot, including communicate, transform, conduct energy and even grow."  This is a quote from Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, who is a professor at Pratt with a research focus on developing wearable technology and smart textiles. Enhancing textiles can be viewed through different lens.  Enhancements can be aesthetic, or performance boosting, or durability boosting. 
Read more