📚 This guide explains how to use Weights & Biases (W&B) with YOLOv5 🚀.
About Weights & Biases
Think of W&B like GitHub for machine learning models. With a few lines of code, save everything you need to debug, compare and reproduce your models — architecture, hyperparameters, git commits, model weights, GPU usage, and even datasets and predictions.
Used by top researchers including teams at OpenAI, Lyft, Github, and MILA, W&B is part of the new standard of best practices for machine learning. How W&B can help you optimize your machine learning workflows:
## First-Time Setup
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When you first train, W&B will prompt you to create a new account and will generate an API key for you. If you are an existing user you can retrieve your key from https://wandb.ai/authorize. This key is used to tell W&B where to log your data. You only need to supply your key once, and then it is remembered on the same device.
W&B will create a cloud project (default is ‘YOLOv5’) for your training runs, and each new training run will be provided a unique run name within that project as project/name. You can also manually set your project and run name as:
$ python train.py --project ... --name ...
Viewing Runs
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Run information streams from your environment to the W&B cloud console as you train. This allows you to monitor and even cancel runs in realtime . All important information is logged:
- Training & Validation losses
- Metrics: Precision, Recall, mAP@0.5, mAP@0.5:0.95
- Learning Rate over time
- A bounding box debugging panel, showing the training progress over time
- GPU: Type, GPU Utilization, power, temperature, CUDA memory usage
- System: Disk I/0, CPU utilization, RAM memory usage
- Your trained model as W&B Artifact
- Environment: OS and Python types, Git repository and state, training command
Advanced Usage
You can leverage W&B artifacts and Tables integration to easily visualize and manage your datasets, models and training evaluations. Here are some quick examples to get you started.
1. Visualize and Version Datasets
Log, visualize, dynamically query, and understand your data with W&B Tables. You can use the following command to log your dataset as a W&B Table. This will generate a {dataset}_wandb.yaml
file which can be used to train from dataset artifact.
Usage
Code $ python utils/logger/wandb/log_dataset.py --project … --name … --data ..
2: Train and Log Evaluation simultaneousy
This is an extension of the previous section, but it’ll also training after uploading the dataset. This also evaluation Table
Evaluation table compares your predictions and ground truths across the validation set for each epoch. It uses the references to the already uploaded datasets,
so no images will be uploaded from your system more than once.
Usage
Code $ python utils/logger/wandb/log_dataset.py --data .. --upload_data
3: Train using dataset artifact
When you upload a dataset as described in the first section, you get a new config file with an added _wandb
to its name. This file contains the information that
can be used to train a model directly from the dataset artifact. This also logs evaluation
Usage
Code $ python utils/logger/wandb/log_dataset.py --data {data}_wandb.yaml
4: Save model checkpoints as artifacts
To enable saving and versioning checkpoints of your experiment, pass --save_period n
with the base cammand, where n
represents checkpoint interval.
You can also log both the dataset and model checkpoints simultaneously. If not passed, only the final model will be logged
Usage
Code $ python train.py --save_period 1
5: Resume runs from checkpoint artifacts.
Any run can be resumed using artifacts if the
--resume
argument starts with
wandb-artifact://
prefix followed by the run path, i.e,
wandb-artifact://username/project/runid
. This doesn’t require the model checkpoint to be present on the local system.
Usage
Code $ python train.py --resume wandb-artifact://{run_path}
6: Resume runs from dataset artifact & checkpoint artifacts.
Local dataset or model checkpoints are not required. This can be used to resume runs directly on a different device
The syntax is same as the previous section, but you’ll need to lof both the dataset and model checkpoints as artifacts, i.e, set bot
--upload_dataset
or
train from
_wandb.yaml
file and set
--save_period
Usage
Code $ python train.py --resume wandb-artifact://{run_path}
Reports
W&B Reports can be created from your saved runs for sharing online. Once a report is created you will receive a link you can use to publically share your results. Here is an example report created from the COCO128 tutorial trainings of all four YOLOv5 models (
link).
## Environments
YOLOv5 may be run in any of the following up-to-date verified environments (with all dependencies including CUDA/CUDNN, Python and PyTorch preinstalled):
## Status
If this badge is green, all YOLOv5 GitHub Actions Continuous Integration (CI) tests are currently passing. CI tests verify correct operation of YOLOv5 training (train.py), validation (val.py), inference (detect.py) and export (export.py) on MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu every 24 hours and on every commit.