Marian regression tests

Marian is an efficient Neural Machine Translation framework written in pure C++ with minimal dependencies.

This repository contains the regression test framework for the main development repository: https://github.com/marian-nmt/marian-dev.

Tests have been developed for Linux for Marian compiled using GCC 8+ and Nvidia Maxwell/Pascal GPUs.

Structure

Directories:

• tests - regression tests
• tools - scripts and repositories
• models - models used in regression tests
• data - data used in training or decoding tests

Each test consists of:

• test_*.sh file
• setup.sh (optional)
• teardown.sh (optional)

Usage

Downloading required data and tools:

make install

Running regression tests:

MARIAN=/path/to/marian-dev/build ./run_mrt.sh

Enabling multi-GPU tests:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0,1 ./run_mrt.sh

More invocation examples:

./run_mrt.sh tests/training/basics
./run_mrt.sh tests/training/basics/test_valid_script.sh
./run_mrt.sh previous.log
./run_mrt.sh '#cpu'

where previous.log contains a list of test files, one test per line. This file is automatically generated each time ./run_mrt.sh finishes running. The last example starts all regression tests labeled with '#tag'. The list of tests annotated with each available tag can be displayed by running ./show_tags.sh, e.g.:

./show_tags.sh cpu

Cleaning test artifacts:

make clean

Notes:

• Majority of tests has been designed for GPU, so the framework assumes it runs Marian compiled with the CUDA support. To run only tests designed for CPU, use ./run_mrt.sh '#cpu'.
• Directories and test files with names starting with an underscore are turned off and are not traversed or executed by ./run_mrt.sh.
• Only some regression tests have been annotated with tags, so, for example, running tests with the tag #scoring may not start all tests for the scorer. The complete tags are #cpu, #server.
• Since Marian version 1.10.42, it needs to be compiled with the CMake flag -DDETERMINISTIC=on in order to successfully pass multi-GPU regression tests.

Debugging failed tests

Failed tests are displayed at the end of testing or in previous.log, e.g.:

Failed:
- tests/training/restoring/multi-gpu/test_async.sh
- tests/training/embeddings/test_custom_embeddings.sh
---------------------
Ran 145 tests in 00:48:48.210s, 143 passed, 0 skipped, 2 failed

Logging messages are in files ending with .sh.log suffix:

less tests/training/restoring/multi-gpu/test_async.sh.log

The last command in most tests is an execution of a custom diff tool, which prints the exact invocation commands with absolute paths. It can be used to display the differences that cause the test fails.

Adding new tests

Use templates provided in tests/_template.

Please follow these recommendations:

• Test one thing at a time
• For comparing outputs with numbers, please use float-friendly tools/diff-nums.py instead of GNU diff
• Make your tests deterministic using --no-shuffle --seed 1111 or similar
• Make training execution time as short as possible, for instance, by reducing the size of the network and the number of iterations
• Do not run decoding or scoring on files longer than ca. 10-100 lines
• If your tests require downloading and running a custom model, please keep it as small as possible, and contact me (Roman) to upload it into our storage

Jenkins

The regression tests are run automatically on Jenkins after each push to the master branch and a successful compilation with GCC 8.4.0 and CUDA 10.1.243: http://vali.inf.ed.ac.uk/jenkins/view/marian/

On Jenkins, Marian is compiled using the following commands:

CC=/usr/bin/gcc-8 CXX=/usr/bin/g++-8 CUDAHOSTCXX=/usr/bin/g++8 \
cmake -DDETERMINISTIC=on -DUSE_SENTENCEPIECE=ON -DUSE_FBGEMM=on \
    -DCOMPILE_CPU=on -DCOMPILE_TESTS=ON -DCOMPILE_EXAMPLES=ON -DCOMPILE_SERVER=ON \
    -DCUDA_TOOLKIT_ROOT_DIR=/var/lib/jenkins/cuda-10.1 ..
make -j
make test

This compilation command allows to build Marian that is needed to test majority of regression tests (only few might be skipped due to requirements for specific CPU architectures).

If this succeeds, created executables are used to run regression tests.

Data storage

We host data and models used for regression tests on the dedicated Azure Storage (see models/download-models.sh). If you want to add new files required for new regression tests to our storage, please open a new issue providing a link to tarball.

Acknowledgements

The development of Marian received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreements 688139 (SUMMA; 2016-2019), 645487 (Modern MT; 2015-2017), 644333 (TraMOOC; 2015-2017), 644402 (HiML; 2015-2017), 825303 (Bergamot; 2019-2021), the Amazon Academic Research Awards program, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and is based upon work supported in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), via contract #FA8650-17-C-9117.

This software contains source code provided by NVIDIA Corporation.