Fast Forward Computer Vision: train models at a fraction of the cost with accelerated data loading!
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Maintainers:
Guillaume Leclerc,
Andrew Ilyas and
Logan Engstrom
ffcv
is a drop-in data loading system that dramatically increases data throughput in model training:
$YOUR_DATASET
model $REALLY_FAST
(for $WAY_LESS
)Keep your training algorithm the same, just replace the data loader! Look at these speedups:
ffcv
also comes prepacked with fast, simple code for standard vision benchmarks:
conda create -y -n ffcv python=3.9 cupy pkg-config libjpeg-turbo opencv pytorch torchvision cudatoolkit=11.3 numba -c pytorch -c conda-forge
conda activate ffcv
pip install ffcv
Troubleshooting note 1: if the above commands result in a package conflict error, try running conda config --env --set channel_priority flexible
in the environment and rerunning the installation command.
Troubleshooting note 2: on some systems (but rarely), you'll need to add the compilers
package to the first command above.
Troubleshooting note 3: courtesy of @kschuerholt, here is a Dockerfile that may help with conda-free installation
..../opencv/build/x64/vc15/bin
to PATH environment variable..../libjpeg-turbo64/bin
to PATH environment variablepthread/include/pthread.h
, and add the code below to the top of the file.
#define HAVE_STRUCT_TIMESPEC
..../pthread/dll
to PATH environment variablepip install ffcv
If you use FFCV, please cite it as:
@inproceedings{leclerc2023ffcv,
author = {Guillaume Leclerc and Andrew Ilyas and Logan Engstrom and Sung Min Park and Hadi Salman and Aleksander Madry},
title = {{FFCV}: Accelerating Training by Removing Data Bottlenecks},
year = {2023},
booktitle = {Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
note = {\url{https://github.com/libffcv/ffcv/}. commit xxxxxxx}
}
(Make sure to replace xxxxxxx above with the hash of the commit used!)
Accelerate any learning system with ffcv
.
First,
convert your dataset into ffcv
format (ffcv
converts both indexed PyTorch datasets and
WebDatasets):
from ffcv.writer import DatasetWriter
from ffcv.fields import RGBImageField, IntField
# Your dataset (`torch.utils.data.Dataset`) of (image, label) pairs
my_dataset = make_my_dataset()
write_path = '/output/path/for/converted/ds.beton'
# Pass a type for each data field
writer = DatasetWriter(write_path, {
# Tune options to optimize dataset size, throughput at train-time
'image': RGBImageField(max_resolution=256),
'label': IntField()
})
# Write dataset
writer.from_indexed_dataset(my_dataset)
Then replace your old loader with the ffcv
loader at train time (in PyTorch,
no other changes required!):
from ffcv.loader import Loader, OrderOption
from ffcv.transforms import ToTensor, ToDevice, ToTorchImage, Cutout
from ffcv.fields.decoders import IntDecoder, RandomResizedCropRGBImageDecoder
# Random resized crop
decoder = RandomResizedCropRGBImageDecoder((224, 224))
# Data decoding and augmentation
image_pipeline = [decoder, Cutout(), ToTensor(), ToTorchImage(), ToDevice(0)]
label_pipeline = [IntDecoder(), ToTensor(), ToDevice(0)]
# Pipeline for each data field
pipelines = {
'image': image_pipeline,
'label': label_pipeline
}
# Replaces PyTorch data loader (`torch.utils.data.Dataloader`)
loader = Loader(write_path, batch_size=bs, num_workers=num_workers,
order=OrderOption.RANDOM, pipelines=pipelines)
# rest of training / validation proceeds identically
for epoch in range(epochs):
...
See here for a more detailed guide to deploying ffcv
for your dataset.
From gridding to benchmarking to fast research iteration, there are many reasons to want faster model training. Below we present premade codebases for training on ImageNet and CIFAR, including both (a) extensible codebases and (b) numerous premade training configurations.
We provide a self-contained script for training ImageNet
Link to Config | top_1 | top_5 | # Epochs | Time (mins) | Architecture | Setup |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Link | 0.784 | 0.941 | 88 | 77.2 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.780 | 0.937 | 56 | 49.4 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.772 | 0.932 | 40 | 35.6 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.766 | 0.927 | 32 | 28.7 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.756 | 0.921 | 24 | 21.7 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.738 | 0.908 | 16 | 14.9 | ResNet-50 | 8 x A100 |
Link | 0.724 | 0.903 | 88 | 187.3 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Link | 0.713 | 0.899 | 56 | 119.4 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Link | 0.706 | 0.894 | 40 | 85.5 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Link | 0.700 | 0.889 | 32 | 68.9 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Link | 0.688 | 0.881 | 24 | 51.6 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Link | 0.669 | 0.868 | 16 | 35.0 | ResNet-18 | 1 x A100 |
Train your own ImageNet models! You can use our training script and premade configurations to train any model seen on the above graphs.
We also include premade code for efficient training on CIFAR-10 in the examples/
directory, obtaining 93\% top1 accuracy in 36 seconds on a single A100 GPU
(without optimizations such as MixUp, Ghost BatchNorm, etc. which have the
potential to raise the accuracy even further). You can find the training script
here.
Computer vision or not, FFCV can help make training faster in a variety of resource-constrained settings! Our performance guide has a more detailed account of the ways in which FFCV can adapt to different performance bottlenecks.
Plug-and-play with any existing training code: Rather than changing aspects of model training itself, FFCV focuses on removing data bottlenecks, which turn out to be a problem everywhere from neural network training to linear regression. This means that:
See our Getting started guide, Example walkthroughs, and Code examples to see how easy it is to get started!