Parameters

Overview

To run HetSeq, almost all the parameters are passed through commond line processed by argparse. Thoses parameters can be grouped into several clusters:

  • Extendable Components Parameters: including task, optimizer, and lr_scheduler;

  • Distributed Parameters: to set up distributed training enviroments;

  • Training Prameters: other important parameters to control stop criteria, logging information, checkpoints and etc.

Here we are going to explain most parameters in details.

Extendable Components Parameters

  • Task: --task: Application name, its corresponding class defines major parts of the application. Currently support bert and mnist, can be extended to other models.

    • --task bert:
      Extra parameters for bert task:
      • --data: Dataset directory or file to be loaded in the corresponding task.

      • --config_file: Configuration file of BERT model, example can be found here

      • --dict: PATH of BPE dictionary for BERT model. Typically it has ~30,000 tokens.

      • --max_pred_length: max number of tokens in a sentence, 512 by default.

      • --num_file: number of input files for training, used with --data to debug. 0 by default to use all the data files.

    • --task mnist:
      Extra parameters for mnist task:
      • --data: Dataset directory or file to be loaded in the corresponding task, compatible with torchvision.datasets.MNIST(path, train=True, download=True).

  • Optimizer: --optimizer: Optimizer defined in HetSeq is based on torch.optim.Optimizer with extra gradient and learning rate manipulation function. Currently support adam and adadelta which can be extended to many other optimizers.

    • --optimizer adam:
      Extra parameters for adam optimizer: Fixed Weight Decay Regularization in Adam.
      • --adam-betas: betas to control momentum and velocity. Default=’(0.9, 0.999)’.

      • --adam-eps: epsilon for avoiding deviding by 0. Default=1e-8.

      • --weight-decay: weight decay. 0 by default.

    • --optimizer adadelta:
      Extra parameters for adadelta optimizer:
      • --adadelta_rho: Default=0.9.

      • --adadelta_eps: epsilon for avoiding deviding by 0. Default=1e-6.

      • --dadelta_weight_decay: 0 by default.

  • Lr_scheduler: --lr_scheduler: Learning rate scheduler defined in HetSeq customized to consider stop criteria end-learning-rate, total-num-update and warmup-updates. Currently support Polynomial Decay Scheduler.

    • --optimizer PolynomialDecayScheduler:
      Extra parameters for PolynomialDecayScheduler:
      • --force-anneal: force annealing at specified epoch, by default not existed.

      • --power: decay power. 1.0 by default.

      • --warmup-updates: warmup the learning rate linearly for the first N updates, 0 by default.

      • --total-num-update: total number of update steps until learning rate decay to --end-learning-rate, 10000 by default.

      • --end-learning-rate: learning rate when traing stops. 0 by default.

Distributed Parameters

Distrbuted parameters play a key role in HetSeq to set up the distrbuted training environments, it defines the number of nodes, number of GPUs, communication methods and etc.

  • --fast-stat-sync: Enable fast sync of stats between nodes, this hardcodes to sync only some default stats from logging_output.

  • --device-id: index of single GPU used in the training. 0 by default.

torch.nn.parallel.distributed import DistributedDataParallel related parameters, see document for more informaiton. Our implementation consider input and put tensors on the same device.

  • --bucket-cap-mb: 25 by default

  • --find-unused-parameters: False by default

torch.distributed.init_process_group related parameters, control the main environment of distributed training. See Distributed Setting or document for more information.
  • --ddp-backend: distributed data parallel backend, currently only support c10d with NCCL to communicate between GPUs. Default: ‘c10d’.

  • --distributed-init-method: initial methods to communicate between GPUs. Default None.

  • --distributed-world-size: total number of GPUs/processes in the distributed seeting. Defalut: max(1, torch.cuda.device_count()).

  • --distributed-rank: rank of the current GPU, 0 by default.

Training Parameters

  • --max-epoch: maximum epoches allowd in the training. 0 by default.

  • --max-update: maximum number of updates allowd in the training. 0 by default.

  • --required-batch-size-multiple: check the batch size is the multiple times of the given number. 1 by default.

  • --update-freq: update parameters every N_i batches, when in epoch i. 1 by default.

  • --max-tokens: maximum number of tokens of a batch, not assigned.

  • --max-sentences: maximum number of sentences/images/instances of a batch (batch size), not assigned.

Note

--max-tokens or --max-sentences must be assigned in the prameter settings.

  • --train-subset: string to store training subset, train by default.

  • --num-workers: number of threads used in the data loading process.

  • --save-interval-updates: save a checkpoint (and validate) every N updates, 0 by default.

  • --seed: onlu seed in the training process to control all the possible random steps (e.g. in torch, numpy and random). 19940802 by default.

  • --log-interval: log progress every N batches (when progress bar is disabled), 1 by default.

  • --log-format: log format to use, choices=[‘none’, ‘simple’], simple by default.