Note

You are reading the documentation for MMSelfSup 0.x, which will soon be deprecated by the end of 2022. We recommend you upgrade to MMSelfSup 1.0.0rc versions to enjoy fruitful new features and better performance brought by OpenMMLab 2.0. Check out the changelog, code and documentation of MMSelfSup 1.0.0rc for more details.

Tutorial 5: Customize Runtime Settings¶

Tutorial 5: Customize Runtime Settings

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

Customize Workflow¶

Workflow is a list of (phase, duration) to specify the running order and duration. The meaning of “duration” depends on the runner’s type.

For example, we use epoch-based runner by default, and the “duration” means how many epochs the phase to be executed in a cycle. Usually, we only want to execute training phase, just use the following config.

workflow = [('train', 1)]

Sometimes we 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 we will run training and valiation for one epoch iteratively.

By default, we recommend using EvalHook to do evaluation after the training epoch.

Hooks¶

The hook mechanism is widely used in the OpenMMLab open-source algorithm library. Inserted in the Runner, the entire life cycle of the training process can be managed easily. You can learn more about the hook through related article.

Hooks only work after being registered into the runner. At present, hooks are mainly divided into two categories:

default training hooks

Those hooks are registered by the runner by default. Generally, they fulfill some basic functions, and have default priority, you don’t need to modify the priority.

custom hooks

The custom hooks are registered through custom_hooks. Generally, they are hooks with enhanced functions. The priority needs to be specified in the configuration file. If you do not specify the priority of the hook, it will be set to ‘NORMAL’ by default.

Priority list

Level	Value
HIGHEST	0
VERY_HIGH	10
HIGH	30
ABOVE_NORMAL	40
NORMAL(default)	50
BELOW_NORMAL	60
LOW	70
VERY_LOW	90
LOWEST	100

The priority determines the execution order of the hooks. Before training, the log will print out the execution order of the hooks at each stage to facilitate debugging.

default training hooks¶

Some common hooks are not registered through custom_hooks, they are

Hooks	Priority
`LrUpdaterHook`	VERY_HIGH (10)
`MomentumUpdaterHook`	HIGH (30)
`OptimizerHook`	ABOVE_NORMAL (40)
`CheckpointHook`	NORMAL (50)
`IterTimerHook`	LOW (70)
`EvalHook`	LOW (70)
`LoggerHook(s)`	VERY_LOW (90)

OptimizerHook, MomentumUpdaterHook and LrUpdaterHook have been introduced in schedule strategy. IterTimerHook is used to record elapsed time and does not support modification.

Here we reveal how to customize CheckpointHook, LoggerHooks, and EvalHook.

CheckpointHook¶

The MMCV runner will use checkpoint_config to initialize CheckpointHook.

checkpoint_config = dict(interval=1)

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

LoggerHooks¶

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

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

EvalHook¶

The config of evaluation will be used to initialize the EvalHook.

The EvalHook has some reserved keys, such as interval, save_best and start, and the other arguments such as metrics will be passed to the dataset.evaluate()

evaluation = dict(interval=1, metric='accuracy', metric_options={'topk': (1, )})

You can save the model weight when the best verification result is obtained by modifying the parameter save_best:

# "auto" means automatically select the metrics to compare.
# You can also use a specific key like "accuracy_top-1".
evaluation = dict(interval=1, save_best="auto", metric='accuracy', metric_options={'topk': (1, )})

When running some large-scale experiments, you can skip the validation step at the beginning of training by modifying the parameter start as below:

evaluation = dict(interval=1, start=200, metric='accuracy', metric_options={'topk': (1, )})

This indicates that, during the first 200 epochs, evaluation will not be executed. From the 200th epoch, evaluation will be executed after the training process.

Use other implemented hooks¶

Some hooks have been already implemented in MMCV and MMClassification, they are:

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')
]

such as using EMAHook, interval is 100 iters:

custom_hooks = [
    dict(type='EMAHook', interval=100, priority='HIGH')
]

Customize self-implemented hooks¶

1. Implement a new hook¶

Here we give an example of creating a new hook in MMSelfSup.

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 your intention of this hook, you need to implement different functionalities in before_run, after_run, before_epoch, after_epoch, before_iter, and after_iter.

2. Import the new hook¶

Then we need to ensure MyHook imported. Assuming MyHook is in mmselfsup/core/hooks/my_hook.py, there are two ways to import it:

Modify mmselfsup/core/hooks/__init__.py as below

from .my_hook import MyHook

__all__ = [..., MyHook, ...]

Use custom_imports in the config to manually import it

custom_imports = dict(imports=['mmselfsup.core.hooks.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 as below:

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

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