Saving and Loading Models
You may wish to save models so that they can be loaded and run in a later session. Flux provides a number of ways to do this. The recommended way, which is the most robust one for long term storage, is to use Flux.state
in combination with a serialization format like JLD2.jl or BSON.jl.
Save a model:
julia> using Flux
julia> struct MyModel
net
end
julia> Flux.@layer MyModel
julia> MyModel() = MyModel(Chain(Dense(10 => 5, relu), Dense(5 => 2)));
julia> model = MyModel()
MyModel(Chain(Dense(10 => 5, relu), Dense(5 => 2))) # 67 parameters
julia> model_state = Flux.state(model);
julia> using JLD2
julia> jldsave("mymodel.jld2"; model_state)
Load it again in a new session using Flux.loadmodel!
:
julia> using Flux, JLD2
julia> model_state = JLD2.load("mymodel.jld2", "model_state");
julia> model = MyModel(); # MyModel definition must be available
julia> Flux.loadmodel!(model, model_state);
If a saved model's parameters are stored on the GPU, the model will not load later on if there is no GPU support available. It's best to move your model to the CPU with cpu(model)
before saving it.
Checkpointing
In longer training runs it's a good idea to periodically save your model, so that you can resume if training is interrupted (for example, if there's a power cut).
julia> using Flux: throttle
julia> using JLD2
julia> m = Chain(Dense(10 => 5, relu), Dense(5 => 2))
Chain(
Dense(10 => 5, relu), # 55 parameters
Dense(5 => 2), # 12 parameters
) # Total: 4 arrays, 67 parameters, 524 bytes.
julia> for epoch in 1:10
# ... train model ...
jldsave("model-checkpoint.jld2", model_state = Flux.state(m))
end;
This will update the "model-checkpoint.jld2"
every epoch.
You can get more advanced by saving a series of models throughout training, for example
jldsave("model-$(now()).jld2", model_state = Flux.state(m))
will produce a series of models like "model-2018-03-06T02:57:10.41.jld2"
. You could also store the current test set loss, so that it's easy to (for example) revert to an older copy of the model if it starts to overfit.
jldsave("model-$(now()).jld2", model_state = Flux.state(m), loss = testloss())
Note that to resume a model's training, you might need to restore other stateful parts of your training loop. Possible examples are the optimiser state and the randomness used to partition the original data into the training and validation sets.
You can store the optimiser state alongside the model, to resume training exactly where you left off:
model = MyModel()
opt_state = Flux.setup(AdamW(), model)
# ... train model ...
model_state = Flux.state(model)
jldsave("checkpoint_epoch=42.jld2"; model_state, opt_state)
Saving Models as Julia Structs
Models are just normal Julia structs, so it's fine to use any Julia storage format to save the struct as it is instead of saving the state returned by Flux.state
. BSON.jl is particularly convenient for this, since it can also save anonymous functions, which are sometimes part of a model definition.
Save a model:
julia> using Flux
julia> model = Chain(Dense(10 => 5, NNlib.relu), Dense(5 => 2));
julia> using BSON: @save
julia> @save "mymodel.bson" model
Load it again in a new session:
julia> using Flux, BSON
julia> BSON.@load "mymodel.bson" model
julia> model
Chain(
Dense(10 => 5, relu), # 55 parameters
Dense(5 => 2), # 12 parameters
) # Total: 4 arrays, 67 parameters, 524 bytes.
Saving models this way could lead to compatibility issues across julia versions and across Flux versions if some of the Flux layers' internals are changed. It is therefore not recommended for long term storage, use Flux.state
instead.