0.4.0 Alpha Release

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me pip install -U dffml commands.

It’s been a long 10 months since our last release. A lot has changed in the world of DFFML. Looking back it’s clear how much progress we’ve made. The work that was done to get us to 0.4.0 has really polished the project. There are no doubt still kinks to work out, but we’ve come a long way.

If you’re new to DFFML. See the Installation and Quickstart documents to get started, then come back here to try out the new features.

Highlights

We have a ton of cool new features in this release. You can see the CHANGELOG for the full details. We’ll cover some highlights here.

  • Custom Neural Networks

    • Saksham, one of our GSoC 2020 students, implemented PyTorch based models. The generic model allows users to use JSON or YAML files to define the layers they want in a neural network.

  • Image classification

    • Saksham also exposed some PyTorch pre-trained models which are very useful for working with images. The full list can be found under dffml-model-pytorch on the model plugins page.

  • Natural Language Processing (NLP) Models and Operations

    • Himanshu, one of our GSoC 2020 students, implemented Natural Language Processing (NLP) models and operations. The Spacy based models can be found under dffml-model-spacy on the model plugins page. The operations can be found under dffml-operations-nlp on the operations plugins page. We had a slight hangup with the release of the Transformers based models, we hope to send all those out you all as soon as possible.

  • Continuous Deployment Examples

    • Aghin, one of our GSoC 2020 students, wrote operations and tutorials which allow users to receive web hooks from GitHub and re-deploy their containerized models and operations whenever their code is updated.

  • New Models

    • In addition to the above mentioned models, we have many more that were added. We now have over 115 models! Check out the model plugins page to see them all.

  • Documentation Testing with Sphinx consoletest extension

    • We developed a Sphinx extension which has allowed us to test the code-block:: console directives and others in our documentation. This serves as integration testing / documentation validation. The Documenting a Model tutorial was written to explain how this can be used to write documentation for your models in the models’ docstrings.

Road to Beta

Things are looking up with regards to the path to our beta release.

We’re going to start deciding what APIs are stable come the 0.5.0 beta release.

Up until then, including now, things have been subject to change at any time as we have learned more about our problem space and how best to architecturally approach it.

We have several major things on deck that we want to get before we declare beta.

  • AutoML

    • We now have a lot of models to choose from and are at the stage where we need models to help us choose our models! We’re going to have AutoML in the Beta release. This will pick the best model with the best hyper parameters for the job.

  • Accuracy Scorers

    • Sudhanshu has been working on this since June 2020. He’s done a major refactor of the codebase to take the accuracy methods out of all the models and move them into .score() methods in a new AccuracyScorer method. This will allow users to more easily compare accuracy of models against each other.

  • Machine Learning support for videos

    • We still need to decide how we’re going to support videos. DFFML’s asynchronous approach will hopefully make it convenient to use with live video streams.

  • Model directories auto stored into archives or remotely

    • We’re going to implement automatic packing and unpacking of directories which models get saved and loaded from into/out of archives, such as Zip, Tar, etc. We’ll also implement plugins to be able to push and pull them from remote storage. This will make models convenient to train in one location and deploy another.

  • Remote execution

    • The HTTP service already allows users to access all the DFFML command line and Python APIs over HTTP. We are going to integrate the High_Level API with the HTTP service. A remote execution plugin type will allow users to install only the base package, and whatever remote execution plugin they want on a machine. Users will then be able to run the HTTP service on a machine with all needed ML packages installed, and their Python API calls will run on the HTTP service. In cases where you have multiple architectures, one of which doesn’t have ML packages compiled for it, this will be helpful (Edge).

  • Config files in place of command line parameters

    • To stop users from having to copy paste so many command line parameters across command invocations, we’ll be implementing support for config files. YAML, JSON, etc. will all be able to be used to store what could also be command line arguments.

  • Command line to config file to Python API to HTTP API auto translation

    • Since DFFML offers consistent APIs across it’s various interfaces, we will be able to implement an auto translator to convert one API to another. This means that if you have a DFFML command line invocation that you want to make into a Python API call, the translator will take your CLI command and output the DFFML Python API calls in Python.

  • DataFlows with operation implementations in multiple languages

    • Our first target is to integrate wasmer to help us run web assembly binaries. We’ll later expand this out to having multiple Operation Implementation networks that will allow users to create DataFlows that run code written in multiple languages. For example, Python, Rust, and Golang. This will allow users to leverage their favorite libraries to get the job done without worrying about them being in different languages.

  • Premade data cleanup DataFlows

    • We’ll have a set of out of the box data cleanup DataFlows that users can use before passing data to models. These will do common data cleanup tasks such as removing horrendous outliers.

  • Continuous deployment tutorials

    • We will expand the tutorials released with 0.4.0 to include deployment behind reverse proxies for multiple projects, including how to setup encryption and authentication in a painless and maintainable way.

  • Pandas DataFrame source

    • This is a small convenience that will probably improve usability. This change will allow us to pass DataFrame objects to the train/accuracy/predict functions.

Collaborations

  • We’re exploring participation with the OpenSSF Identifying Security Threats working group. Their effort is similar to shouldi and we might be able to contribute some of what we’ve done there.

  • We’re exploring another use of DFFML internally at Intel. This time leveraging DataFlows more so than Machine Learning.

Thanks

Since 0.3.7 we’ve seen 35203/10423 insertions(+)/deletions(-) lines changed, added, or removed, across 757 files.

You all have done amazing stuff!! Great job and keep up the good work!

  • Aadarsh Singh

  • Aghin Shah Alin

  • Aitik Gupta

  • Geetansh Saxena

  • Hashim

  • Himanshu Tripathi

  • Ichisada Shioko

  • Jan Keromnes

  • Justin Moore

  • Naeem Khoshnevis

  • Nitesh Yadav

  • Oliver O’Brien

  • Saksham Arora

  • Shaurya Puri

  • Shivam Singh

  • Sudeep Sidhu

  • Sudhanshu kumar

  • Sudharsana K J L

  • Yash Lamba

  • Yash Varshney