Compressed Feather in Pandas

A nifty feature in pandas I totally missed - saving not only .csv data frames compressed, but also .feather ones. Reduces files size 4-5x for repetitive data.

- Pandas to feather doc
- Pyarrow to feather doc

#data_science

A First Legitimate Use of Crypto?

Seems a bit ridiculous, but looks like a decent way for bands / artists to hold auctions for their creations:

- https://opensea.io/collection/clowncoin

PyTorch 1.8 Released

- https://pytorch.org/blog/pytorch-1.8-released/
- https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch/releases

Apart from mostly fixes, and some nice quantization (still no transformer!) and ONNX improvements, I really like this additions:

(0)

PyTorch Lite Interpreter is a streamlined version of the PyTorch runtime that can execute PyTorch programs in resource constrained devices, with reduced binary size footprint. This prototype feature reduces binary sizes by up to 70% compared to the current on-device runtime in the current release.

Link

(1)

Starting in PyTorch 1.8, we have added support for ROCm wheels providing an easy onboarding to using AMD GPUs.

Link

(2)
New beta benchmark utils
Link

(3)
New PyTorch Mobile demos

(4)
New quantization API
link

(5)
New related libraries release (i.e. torchaudio, torchvision), looks like they are tied to PyTorch releases now

#deep_learning

Happy 8th of March xD

PyTorch New Quantization API

A brief summary why PyTorch has a new prototype API for quantization - looks like the previous API was too difficult? It wasn't really, but it required some fiddling and non-standard layers just did not work:

Torch FX

- https://pytorch.org/docs/master/fx.html

X is a toolkit for developers to use to transform nn.Module instances. FX consists of three main components: a symbolic tracer, an intermediate representation, and Python code generation.

I understand that people building PyTorch usually favour flexible toolkits (and they expose a lot to an end user) and most likely they just realized that static quantization was too complex for an average user to handle and they wrote this as an engine for automated quantization transformations, which is cool. Designing a proper API is always a balancing act.

Over the years, I became quite good in monkey patching PyTorch code just using python's and pytorch tools (e.g. module.named_modules()). So I wonder what the killer use case of this feature would be?

One thing comes to mind immediately - when you have the same models with static control flows and you need to create a quantized / torch script version of it. Now it is a pain in the ass - because it requires manually switching them back and forth (switch on, create a quantized TorchScript version one, switch back, create another one, etc).

Will I use it? I guess I need to sleep on it. We ended up not using static quantization very much. Looks very cool and flexible, serves a real purpose, but usually stupid one line hacks can do the same without learning a new tool.

So idk, what do you think? Do you like any of the examples? I like the invert one.

#deep_learning

New Benchmarking Tool in PyTorch

https://pytorch.org/tutorials/recipes/recipes/benchmark.html#pytorch-benchmark

Looks a bit over-complicated at the first glance (why provide classes for random tensor generation, I have no idea), but it has a few very nice features:

- Automated num_threads handling
- Automated CUDA synchronization
- Report generation, storing the results, comparing the results

But I suppose there is nothing wrong just using %%timeit manually setting num_threads.

#deep_learning

Building Your Own Supercomputer Cheap (RU)


My guest post on ODS @ habr:

- https://habr.com/ru/company/ods/blog/546808/

EDIT - some awesome comments!

#deep_learning

📎

BIFURCATED RISER X16 TO 2X8 (SET)

Remember that there is a very limited number of motherboards with 5+ PCIE slots?

Now there are risers like this - https://riser.maxcloudon.com/ru/bifurcated-risers/25-bifurcated-riser-x16-to-2x8-set.html

Has anyone tried something similar for DL?

#deep_learning

📎

While ThreadRipper Pro MBs are impossible to buy, this MB may be the base for our next huge server build:

- https://market.yandex.ru/product--materinskaia-plata-asrock-rack-romed8-2t/705623617

Looks a bit expensive (and it uses ECC RAM + EPYC processors), but with 7 x PCIE 4.0 16x and 2x10Gbit/s Ethernet possibilities are limitless.

📎

And another hack - buying used 100 GBit/s infiniband cards from ebay, they are cheap now in the US

#deep_learning

TLDR Doom Eternal Review

The og game - once in a generation game. 11/10. Go play it. Beat ultra nightmare.

DLC 1 - epic, beautiful and ball crushing. Beat ultra nightmare if you have the balls.

DLC 2 - fun, beautiful, but a bit rushed and disappointing ending / boss. Does not up the ante for seasoned players at all.

#off_topic

Silero VAD Micro 8 kHz

10k param VAD added (vs. 1.1m params) for 8 kHz audio only.

If you do not want to do any resampling.

https://github.com/snakers4/silero-vad

PyTorch + AMD Inference

We were benchmarking our networks on Intel vs AMD processors using out-of-the-box official build.

And Intel mostly is better (with the same number of threads and roughly the same core speed and lack of overclocking). I was wondering why this is, and then I found this thread.

To be honest I have little motivation to invest time in redoing our environment builds from scratch with OpenBLAS + CUDA (and most likely it is not worth the time since in production most likely there will be Intel CPUs).

But I wonder, does anyone in the community have dockerized dev environment builds based around CUDA + OpenBLAS? Because looks like out of the box PyTorch ships with MKL by Intel.

#deep_learning

Factorized Networks

I really like the idea from this article - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/factorized-layers-revisited-compressing-deep-networks-without-playing-the-lottery/

Basically you do not prune networks (which does not readily transfer into inference) or distill your teacher network into a student, but train a low-rank factorized version of the network with some optimizations from scratch.

This article even has code, but basically ... this is an older fork of fairseq imported via 1 commit. So good luck doing what authors did not bother to do (providing a stand-alone implementation).

So the question is - has anyone seen a minimalist stand-alone implementation for something similar?

#deep_learning

Speeding Up Your Transformer Based Networks For Real

You know that there are a lot of pruning / distillation papers that boast 90% sparsification, but it is impossible to use this in production? Looks like I stumbled upon some decent recipe.

Well, you can take a well-trained transformer based network and just replace all of the Linear layers with their low-rank counterparts initialized using SVD (spectral initialization).

But does it really work?

I tested it today, it worked.

How well does it work?

On a not-quite trained network my loss after 1 epoch of tuning was 25-30% higher with a factorized model compared to a full model. I took 25% of eigenvalues and they amounted for about ~50% of total.

The metrics took a significant hit, but on simpler classification tasks it should work better.

What are the benefits?

25% factorization (i.e. taking only 25% of all eigenvalues) produces a model that is 50% smaller.

Is it worth it?

The main question is that can you take either (i) a poorly trained or (ii) well-trained network and train it until it reaches the same numbers as the full model.

This remains to be seen.

class FactorizedLinear(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self,
                 or_linear,
                 dim_ratio=1.0):
        super().__init__()
        self.bias = nn.parameter.Parameter(or_linear.bias.data, requires_grad=True)
        u, vh = self.spectral_init(or_linear.weight.data, dim_ratio=dim_ratio)
        print(f'Doing SVD of tensor {or_linear.weight.shape}, U: {u.shape}, Vh: {vh.shape}')
        self.u = nn.parameter.Parameter(u, requires_grad=True)
        self.vh = nn.parameter.Parameter(vh, requires_grad=True)
        self.dim_ratio = dim_ratio
        self.in_features = u.size(0)
        self.out_features = vh.size(1)

    @staticmethod
    def spectral_init(m,
                      dim_ratio=1):
        u, s, vh = torch.linalg.svd(m, full_matrices=False)
        u = u @ torch.diag(torch.sqrt(s))
        vh = torch.diag(torch.sqrt(s)) @ vh
        if dim_ratio < 1:
            dims = int(u.size(1) * dim_ratio)
            u = u[:, :dims]
            vh = vh[:dims, :]
            s_share = s[:dims].sum() / s.sum() * 100
            print(f'SVD eigenvalue share {s_share:.2f}%')
        return u, vh

    def extra_repr(self) -> str:
        return (f'in_features={self.in_features}, '
                f'out_features={self.out_features}, '
                f'bias=True, dim_ratio={self.dim_ratio}')

    def forward(self, x):
        return x @ (self.u @ self.vh).transpose(0, 1) + self.bias

# deep_learning

Silero TTS Released

Surprise! A quick pre-release of Silero Text-to-Speech models!

Speakers

10 voices (each available in 16 kHz and 8 kHz):

- 6 Russian voices;
- 1 English voice;
- 1 German voice, 1 Spanish voice, 1 French voice;

Why is this Different?

- One-line usage;
- A large library of voices;
- A fully end-to-end pipeline;
- Naturally sounding speech;
- No GPU or training required;
- Minimalism and lack of dependencies;
- Faster than real-time on one CPU thread (!!!);
- Support for 16kHz and 8kHz out of the box;

Links

- Try our TTS models here;
- Quick summary;
- Performance benchmarks;

Stay tuned for much more detailed PR releases and torch.hub release soon!