Get Started

This is a guide for getting started with Intel® Transfer Learning Tool and will walk you through the steps to check system requirements, install, and then run the tool with a couple of examples showing no-code CLI and low-code API approaches.

Intel Transfer Learning Tool Get Started Flow

① Check System Requirements

Recommended Hardware	Precision
Intel® 4th Gen Xeon® Scalable Performance processors	BF16
Intel® 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Gen Xeon® Scalable Performance processors	FP32

Resource	Minimum
CPU Cores	8 (16+ recommended)
RAM	16 GB (24-32+ GB recommended)
Disk space	10 GB minimum (can vary based on datasets downloaded)

Required Software
Linux* system (validated on Ubuntu* 20.04/22.04 LTS)
Python (3.8, 3.9, or 3.10)
Pip
Conda or Python virtualenv
git (only required for advanced installation)

② Install

Install Dependencies

Install required packages using:

sudo apt-get install build-essential python3-dev libgl1 libglib2.0-0

Create and activate a Python3 virtual environment

We encourage you to use a Python virtual environment (virtualenv or conda) for consistent package management. There are two ways to do this:

a. Use virtualenv:
```
virtualenv -p python3 tlt_dev_venv
source tlt_dev_venv/bin/activate
```
b. Or use conda:
```
conda create --name tlt_dev_venv python=3.9
conda activate tlt_dev_venv
```
Install Intel Transfer Learning Tool

Use the Basic Installation instructions unless you plan on making code changes.

a. Basic Installation
```
pip install intel-transfer-learning-tool
```
b. Advanced Installation

Clone the repo:
```
git clone https://github.com/IntelAI/transfer-learning.git
cd transfer-learning
```
Then either do an editable install to avoid a rebuild and install after each code change (preferred):
```
pip install --editable .
```
or build and install a wheel:
```
python setup.py bdist_wheel
pip install dist/intel_transfer_learning_tool-0.5.0-py3-none-any.whl
```
Additional Feature-Specific Steps
- For distributed/multinode training, follow these additional distributed training instructions.
Verify Installation

Verify that your installation was successful by using the following command, which displays help information about the Intel Transfer Learning Tool:
```
tlt --help
```

③ Run the Intel Transfer Learning Tool

With the Intel Transfer Learning Tool, you can train AI models with TensorFlow or PyTorch using either no-code CLI commands at a bash prompt, or low-code API calls from a Python script. Both approaches provide the same opportunities for training, evaluation, optimization, and benchmarking. With the CLI, no programming experience is required, and you'll need basic Python knowledge to use the API. Choose the approach that works best for you.

Run Using the No-Code CLI

Let's continue from the previous step where you prepared the dataset, and train a model using CLI commands. This example uses the CLI to train an image classifier to identify different types of flowers. You can see a list of all available image classifier models using the command:

tlt list models --use-case image_classification

Train a Model

In this example, we'll use the tlt train command to retrain the TensorFlow ResNet50v1.5 model using a flowers dataset from the TensorFlow Datasets catalog. The --dataset-dir and --output-dir paths need to point to writable folders on your system.

# Use the follow environment variable setting to reduce the warnings and log output from TensorFlow
export TF_CPP_MIN_LOG_LEVEL="2"

tlt train -f tensorflow --model-name resnet_v1_50 --dataset-name tf_flowers --dataset-dir "/tmp/data-${USER}" --output-dir "/tmp/output-${USER}"

Model name: resnet_v1_50
Framework: tensorflow
Dataset name: tf_flowers
Training epochs: 1
Dataset dir: /tmp/data-user
Output directory: /tmp/output-user
...
Model: "sequential"
_________________________________________________________________
Layer (type)                Output Shape              Param #
=================================================================
keras_layer (KerasLayer)    (None, 2048)              23561152
dense (Dense)               (None, 5)                 10245
=================================================================
Total params: 23,571,397
Trainable params: 10,245
Non-trainable params: 23,561,152
_________________________________________________________________
Checkpoint directory: /tmp/output-user/resnet_v1_50_checkpoints
86/86 [==============================] - 24s 248ms/step - loss: 0.4600 - acc: 0.8438
Saved model directory: /tmp/output-user/resnet_v1_50/1

After training completes, the tlt train command evaluates the model. The loss and accuracy values are printed toward the end of the console output. The model is exported to the output directory you specified in a numbered folder created for each training run.

Next Steps

That ends this Get Started CLI example. As a next step, you can also follow the Beyond Get Started CLI Example for a complete example that includes evaluation, benchmarking, and quantization in the datasets.

Read about all the CLI commands in the CLI reference. Find more examples in our list of Examples.

Run Using the Low-Code API

The following Python code example trains an image classification model with the TensorFlow flowers dataset using API calls from Python. The model is benchmarked and quantized to INT8 precision for improved inference performance.

You can run the API example using a Jupyter notebook. See the notebook setup instructions for more details for preparing the Jupyter notebook environment.

import os

os.environ["TF_CPP_MIN_LOG_LEVEL"] = "2"

from tlt.datasets import dataset_factory
from tlt.models import model_factory
from tlt.utils.types import FrameworkType, UseCaseType

username = os.getenv('USER', 'user')

# Specify a writable directory for the dataset to be downloaded
dataset_dir = '/tmp/data-{}'.format(username)
if not os.path.exists(dataset_dir):
    os.makedirs(dataset_dir)

# Specify a writeable directory for output (such as saved model files)
output_dir = '/tmp/output-{}'.format(username)
if not os.path.exists(output_dir):
    os.makedirs(output_dir)

# Get the model
model = model_factory.get_model(model_name="resnet_v1_50", framework=FrameworkType.TENSORFLOW)

# Download and preprocess the flowers dataset from the TensorFlow datasets catalog
dataset = dataset_factory.get_dataset(dataset_dir=dataset_dir,
                                      dataset_name='tf_flowers',
                                      use_case=UseCaseType.IMAGE_CLASSIFICATION,
                                      framework=FrameworkType.TENSORFLOW,
                                      dataset_catalog='tf_datasets')
dataset.preprocess(image_size=model.image_size, batch_size=32)
dataset.shuffle_split(train_pct=.75, val_pct=.25)

# Train the model using the dataset
model.train(dataset, output_dir=output_dir, epochs=1)

# Evaluate the trained model
metrics = model.evaluate(dataset)
for metric_name, metric_value in zip(model._model.metrics_names, metrics):
    print("{}: {}".format(metric_name, metric_value))

# Export the model
saved_model_dir = model.export(output_dir=output_dir)

# Quantize the trained model
quantization_output = os.path.join(output_dir, "quantized_model")
model.quantize(quantization_output, dataset, overwrite_model=True)

# Benchmark the trained model using the Intel Neural Compressor config file
model.benchmark(dataset, saved_model_dir=quantization_output)

# Do graph optimization on the trained model
optimization_output = os.path.join(output_dir, "optimized_model")
model.optimize_graph(optimization_output, overwrite_model=True)

For more information on the API, see the API Documentation.

Summary and Next Steps

The Intel Transfer Learning Tool can be used to develop an AI model and export an Intel-optimized saved model for deployment. The sample CLI and API commands we've presented show how to execute end-to-end transfer learning workflows.

For the no-code CLI, you can follow a complete example that includes trainng, evaluation, benchmarking, and quantization in the datasets, as well as some additional models in the Beyond Get Started CLI example documentation. You can also read about all the CLI commands in the CLI reference.

For the low-code API, read about the API in the API Documentation.

Find more CLI and API examples in our list of Examples.