TRAINS

Auto-Magical Experiment Manager & Version Control for AI

"Because it’s a jungle out there"

TRAINS is our solution to a problem we share with countless other researchers and developers in the machine learning/deep learning universe: Training production-grade deep learning models is a glorious but messy process. TRAINS tracks and controls the process by associating code version control, research projects, performance metrics, and model provenance.

We designed TRAINS specifically to require effortless integration so that teams can preserve their existing methods and practices. Use it on a daily basis to boost collaboration and visibility, or use it to automatically collect your experimentation logs, outputs, and data to one centralized server.

(Experience TRAINS live at https://demoapp.trainsai.io)

TRAINS Automatically Logs Everything

With only two lines of code, this is what you are getting:

• Git repository, branch, commit id, entry point and local git diff
• Python packages (including specific version)
• StdOut and StdErr
• Support for Jupyter Notebook (see trains-jupyter-plugin) and PyCharm remote debugging (see trains-pycharm-plugin)
• Hyper-parameters
  • ArgParser for command line parameters with currently used values
  • Explicit parameters dictionary
• Tensorflow Defines (absl-py)
• Initial model weights file
• Model snapshots
• Tensorboard/TensorboardX scalars, metrics, histograms, images (with audio coming soon)
• Matplotlib & Seaborn
• Tensorflow, PyTorch, Keras, XGBoost and Scikit-Learn are supported (MxNet is coming soon)

Detailed overview of TRAINS offering and system design can be found Here.

Using TRAINS

TRAINS is a two part solution:

1. TRAINS python package (auto-magically connects your code, see Using TRAINS)

   TRAINS requires only two lines of code for full integration.

   To connect your code with TRAINS:

   • Install TRAINS

       pip install trains
     

   • Add the following lines to your code

       from trains import Task
       task = Task.init(project_name="my project", task_name="my task")
     

     • If project_name is not provided, the repository name will be used instead
     • If task_name (experiment) is not provided, the current filename will be used instead

   • Run your code. When TRAINS connects to the server, a link is printed. For example

       TRAINS Results page:
       https://demoapp.trainsai.io/projects/76e5e2d45e914f52880621fe64601e85/experiments/241f06ae0f5c4b27b8ce8b64890ce152/output/log
     

   • Open the link and view your experiment parameters, model and tensorboard metrics

   See full examples here

2. TRAINS-server for logging, querying, control and UI (Web-App)

We have a demo server up and running at https://demoapp.trainsai.io. You can try out TRAINS and test your code with it. Note that it resets every 24 hours and all of the data is deleted.

When you are ready to use your own TRAINS server, go ahead and install TRAINS-server.

System diagram of TRAINS in action

Configuring Your Own TRAINS server

1. Install and run TRAINS-server (see Installing the TRAINS Server)

2. Run the initial configuration wizard for your TRAINS installation and follow the instructions to setup TRAINS package (http://trains-server-ip:port and user credentials)

    trains-init
   

After installing and configuring, you can access your configuration file at ~/trains.conf

Sample configuration file available here.

Who We Are

TRAINS is supported by the same team behind allegro.ai, where we build deep learning pipelines and infrastructure for enterprise companies.

We built TRAINS to track and control the glorious but messy process of training production-grade deep learning models. We are committed to vigorously supporting and expanding the capabilities of TRAINS.

Why Are We Releasing TRAINS?

We believe TRAINS is ground-breaking. We wish to establish new standards of experiment management in deep-learning and ML. Only the greater community can help us do that.

We promise to always be backwardly compatible. If you start working with TRAINS today, even though this project is currently in the beta stage, your logs and data will always upgrade with you.

License

Apache License, Version 2.0 (see the LICENSE for more information)

Community & Support

For more examples and use cases, check examples.

If you have any questions, look to the TRAINS FAQ, or tag your questions on stackoverflow with 'trains' tag.

For feature requests or bug reports, please use GitHub issues.

Additionally, you can always find us at trains@allegro.ai

Contributing

See the TRAINS Guidelines for Contributing.

May the force (and the goddess of learning rates) be with you!