VQA Experiments

A collection of experiments and explorations related to Visual Question Answering

Local setup

Create a virtual environment

There are many ways to create a virtual environment. Here is one of them using pyenv:

• If you don't have Python 3.10.10 installed, do it as following:

pyenv install 3.10.10

• Create a virtual environment:

pyenv virtualenv 3.10.10 vqa

• Activate it for the working directory:

pyenv local vqa

Install dependencies and pre-commit hooks

make init-dev

or just

make

Specify environment variables

cp .env.template .env

• Replace the ... with corresponding values.

Working on server

• To copy a directory from local host to a remote host via SCP (example):

scp -r /local/directory/ username@to_host:/remote/directory/

• To copy a directory from a remote host to local host via SCP (example):

scp -r username@from_host:/remote/directory/ /local/directory/

Using Jupiter Notebook

• To run a Jupiter Notebook on the server:

export SINGULARITYENV_WANDB_API_KEY=<your-value>
export SINGULARITYENV_WANDB_ENTITY=<your-entity-name>
export HF_DATASETS_CACHE="/shared/sets/datasets/huggingface_cache"
export DATASETS_PATH="/shared/sets/datasets"
export SAVE_ARTIFACTS_PATH="/.local/share"
cd scripts && sbatch run-jupyter.sh

• To access the notebook, one can use a command like this:

ssh -N -f -L localhost:8989:localhost:8989 [username]@[server-job-runs-on].gmum

• To get the name of the server job runs on, one can use a command like this:

squeue -u [username]

The result should look like this:

             JOBID PARTITION     NAME     USER ST       TIME  NODES NODELIST(REASON)
            123456     batch run-jup username  R       0:01      1 node-1

Then, one can use the node-1 name to access the notebook.

• Then, one can access the notebook via a browser at localhost:8989.
• To stop the notebook, one can use a command like this:

scancel <job_id>

• To get the job id, one can use a command like this:

squeue -u <username> -n jupyter

• To get the list of all the running jobs, one can use a command like this:

squeue -u <username>

Synchronize the local directory with the remote one

• To synchronize the local directory with the remote one, one can use a command like this:

rsync -vrzhe ssh vqa/ [username]@[server]:./vqa

• One can use a helper script to automatically submit an experiment to the cluster:

./submit.sh [experiment|jupyter]

DVC

• DVC is used to persist the data and models, track data pipelines, and reproduce experiments.
• The remote storage is configured to be an SSH Server
• There are several pipelines for data preprocessing.
• To reproduce them, one can use a command like this:

dvc repro