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Tutorial 7: Customize Runtime Settings

In this tutorial, we will introduce some methods about how to customize optimization methods, training schedules, workflow and hooks when running your own settings for the project.

Customize Optimization Methods

Customize optimizer supported by PyTorch

We already support to use all the optimizers implemented by PyTorch, and the only modification is to change the optimizer field of config files. For example, if you want to use Adam, the modification could be as the following.

optimizer = dict(type='Adam', lr=0.0003, weight_decay=0.0001)

To modify the learning rate of the model, the users only need to modify the lr in the config of optimizer. The users can directly set arguments following the API doc of PyTorch.

For example, if you want to use Adam with the setting like torch.optim.Adam(params, lr=0.001, betas=(0.9, 0.999), eps=1e-08, weight_decay=0, amsgrad=False) in PyTorch, the modification could be set as the following.

optimizer = dict(type='Adam', lr=0.001, betas=(0.9, 0.999), eps=1e-08, weight_decay=0, amsgrad=False)

Customize self-implemented optimizer

1. Define a new optimizer

A customized optimizer could be defined as following.

Assume you want to add an optimizer named MyOptimizer, which has arguments a, b, and c. You need to create a new directory named mmaction/core/optimizer. And then implement the new optimizer in a file, e.g., in mmaction/core/optimizer/my_optimizer.py:

from mmcv.runner import OPTIMIZERS
from torch.optim import Optimizer


@OPTIMIZERS.register_module()
class MyOptimizer(Optimizer):

    def __init__(self, a, b, c):

2. Add the optimizer to registry

To find the above module defined above, this module should be imported into the main namespace at first. There are two ways to achieve it.

  • Modify mmaction/core/optimizer/__init__.py to import it.

    The newly defined module should be imported in mmaction/core/optimizer/__init__.py so that the registry will find the new module and add it:

from .my_optimizer import MyOptimizer
  • Use custom_imports in the config to manually import it
custom_imports = dict(imports=['mmaction.core.optimizer.my_optimizer'], allow_failed_imports=False)

The module mmaction.core.optimizer.my_optimizer will be imported at the beginning of the program and the class MyOptimizer is then automatically registered. Note that only the package containing the class MyOptimizer should be imported. mmaction.core.optimizer.my_optimizer.MyOptimizer cannot be imported directly.

3. Specify the optimizer in the config file

Then you can use MyOptimizer in optimizer field of config files. In the configs, the optimizers are defined by the field optimizer like the following:

optimizer = dict(type='SGD', lr=0.02, momentum=0.9, weight_decay=0.0001)

To use your own optimizer, the field can be changed to

optimizer = dict(type='MyOptimizer', a=a_value, b=b_value, c=c_value)

Customize optimizer constructor

Some models may have some parameter-specific settings for optimization, e.g. weight decay for BatchNorm layers. The users can do those fine-grained parameter tuning through customizing optimizer constructor.

from mmcv.runner.optimizer import OPTIMIZER_BUILDERS


@OPTIMIZER_BUILDERS.register_module()
class MyOptimizerConstructor:

    def __init__(self, optimizer_cfg, paramwise_cfg=None):
        pass

    def __call__(self, model):

        return my_optimizer

The default optimizer constructor is implemented here, which could also serve as a template for new optimizer constructor.

Additional settings

Tricks not implemented by the optimizer should be implemented through optimizer constructor (e.g., set parameter-wise learning rates) or hooks. We list some common settings that could stabilize the training or accelerate the training. Feel free to create PR, issue for more settings.

  • Use gradient clip to stabilize training: Some models need gradient clip to clip the gradients to stabilize the training process. An example is as below:

    optimizer_config = dict(grad_clip=dict(max_norm=35, norm_type=2))

  • Use momentum schedule to accelerate model convergence: We support momentum scheduler to modify model's momentum according to learning rate, which could make the model converge in a faster way. Momentum scheduler is usually used with LR scheduler, for example, the following config is used in 3D detection to accelerate convergence. For more details, please refer to the implementation of CyclicLrUpdater and CyclicMomentumUpdater.

    lr_config = dict(
    policy='cyclic',
    target_ratio=(10, 1e-4),
    cyclic_times=1,
    step_ratio_up=0.4,
)
momentum_config = dict(
    policy='cyclic',
    target_ratio=(0.85 / 0.95, 1),
    cyclic_times=1,
    step_ratio_up=0.4,
)

Customize Training Schedules

we use step learning rate with default value in config files, this calls StepLRHook in MMCV. We support many other learning rate schedule here, such as CosineAnnealing and Poly schedule. Here are some examples

  • Poly schedule:

    lr_config = dict(policy='poly', power=0.9, min_lr=1e-4, by_epoch=False)

  • ConsineAnnealing schedule:

    lr_config = dict(
    policy='CosineAnnealing',
    warmup='linear',
    warmup_iters=1000,
    warmup_ratio=1.0 / 10,
    min_lr_ratio=1e-5)

Customize Workflow

By default, we recommend users to use EvalHook to do evaluation after training epoch, but they can still use val workflow as an alternative.

Workflow is a list of (phase, epochs) to specify the running order and epochs. By default it is set to be

workflow = [('train', 1)]

which means running 1 epoch for training. Sometimes user may want to check some metrics (e.g. loss, accuracy) about the model on the validate set. In such case, we can set the workflow as

[('train', 1), ('val', 1)]

so that 1 epoch for training and 1 epoch for validation will be run iteratively.

:::{note}

  1. The parameters of model will not be updated during val epoch.
  2. Keyword total_epochs in the config only controls the number of training epochs and will not affect the validation workflow.
  3. Workflows [('train', 1), ('val', 1)] and [('train', 1)] will not change the behavior of EvalHook because EvalHook is called by after_train_epoch and validation workflow only affect hooks that are called through after_val_epoch. Therefore, the only difference between [('train', 1), ('val', 1)] and [('train', 1)] is that the runner will calculate losses on validation set after each training epoch.

:::

Customize Hooks

Customize self-implemented hooks

1. Implement a new hook

Here we give an example of creating a new hook in MMAction2 and using it in training.

from mmcv.runner import HOOKS, Hook


@HOOKS.register_module()
class MyHook(Hook):

    def __init__(self, a, b):
        pass

    def before_run(self, runner):
        pass

    def after_run(self, runner):
        pass

    def before_epoch(self, runner):
        pass

    def after_epoch(self, runner):
        pass

    def before_iter(self, runner):
        pass

    def after_iter(self, runner):
        pass

Depending on the functionality of the hook, the users need to specify what the hook will do at each stage of the training in before_run, after_run, before_epoch, after_epoch, before_iter, and after_iter.

2. Register the new hook

Then we need to make MyHook imported. Assuming the file is in mmaction/core/utils/my_hook.py there are two ways to do that:

  • Modify mmaction/core/utils/__init__.py to import it.

    The newly defined module should be imported in mmaction/core/utils/__init__.py so that the registry will find the new module and add it:

from .my_hook import MyHook
  • Use custom_imports in the config to manually import it
custom_imports = dict(imports=['mmaction.core.utils.my_hook'], allow_failed_imports=False)

3. Modify the config

custom_hooks = [
    dict(type='MyHook', a=a_value, b=b_value)
]

You can also set the priority of the hook by adding key priority to 'NORMAL' or 'HIGHEST' as below

custom_hooks = [
    dict(type='MyHook', a=a_value, b=b_value, priority='NORMAL')
]

By default the hook's priority is set as NORMAL during registration.

Use hooks implemented in MMCV

If the hook is already implemented in MMCV, you can directly modify the config to use the hook as below

mmcv_hooks = [
    dict(type='MMCVHook', a=a_value, b=b_value, priority='NORMAL')
]

Modify default runtime hooks

There are some common hooks that are not registered through custom_hooks but has been registered by default when importing MMCV, they are

  • log_config
  • checkpoint_config
  • evaluation
  • lr_config
  • optimizer_config
  • momentum_config

In those hooks, only the logger hook has the VERY_LOW priority, others' priority are NORMAL. The above-mentioned tutorials already cover how to modify optimizer_config, momentum_config, and lr_config. Here we reveals how what we can do with log_config, checkpoint_config, and evaluation.

Checkpoint config

The MMCV runner will use checkpoint_config to initialize CheckpointHook.

checkpoint_config = dict(interval=1)

The users could set max_keep_ckpts to only save only small number of checkpoints or decide whether to store state dict of optimizer by save_optimizer. More details of the arguments are here

Log config

The log_config wraps multiple logger hooks and enables to set intervals. Now MMCV supports WandbLoggerHook, MlflowLoggerHook, and TensorboardLoggerHook. The detail usages can be found in the doc.

log_config = dict(
    interval=50,
    hooks=[
        dict(type='TextLoggerHook'),
        dict(type='TensorboardLoggerHook')
    ])

Evaluation config

The config of evaluation will be used to initialize the EvalHook. Except the key interval, other arguments such as metrics will be passed to the dataset.evaluate()

evaluation = dict(interval=1, metrics='bbox')