Amazon SageMaker - Debugging with custom rules


This notebook’s CI test result for us-west-2 is as follows. CI test results in other regions can be found at the end of the notebook.

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Amazon SageMaker is managed platform to build, train and host maching learning models. Amazon SageMaker Debugger is a new feature which offers the capability to debug machine learning models during training by identifying and detecting problems with the models in near real-time.

In this notebook, we’ll show you how to use a custom rule to monitor your training job. All through a tf.keras ResNet example.

How does Amazon SageMaker Debugger work?

Amazon SageMaker Debugger lets you go beyond just looking at scalars like losses and accuracies during training and gives you full visibility into all tensors ‘flowing through the graph’ during training. Furthermore, it helps you monitor your training in near real-time using rules and provides you alerts, once it has detected inconsistency in training flow.

Concepts

  • Tensors: These represent the state of the training network at intermediate points during its execution

  • Debug Hook: Hook is the construct with which Amazon SageMaker Debugger looks into the training process and captures the tensors requested at the desired step intervals

  • Rule: A logical construct, implemented as Python code, which helps analyze the tensors captured by the hook and report anomalies, if at all

With these concepts in mind, let’s understand the overall flow of things that Amazon SageMaker Debugger uses to orchestrate debugging.

Saving tensors during training

The tensors captured by the debug hook are stored in the S3 location specified by you. There are two ways you can configure Amazon SageMaker Debugger to save tensors:

With no changes to your training script

If you use one of the Amazon SageMaker provided Deep Learning Containers for 1.15, then you don’t need to make any changes to your training script for the tensors to be stored. Amazon SageMaker Debugger will use the configuration you provide through the Amazon SageMaker SDK’s Tensorflow Estimator when creating your job to save the tensors in the fashion you specify. You can review the script we are going to use at src/tf_keras_resnet_zerocodechange.py. You will note that this is an untouched TensorFlow Keras script which uses the tf.keras interface. Please note that Amazon SageMaker Debugger only supports tf.keras, tf.estimator and tf.MonitoredSession interfaces for the zero script change experience. Full description of support is available at Amazon SageMaker Debugger with TensorFlow

Orchestrating your script to store tensors

For other containers, you need to make couple of lines of changes to your training script. Amazon SageMaker Debugger exposes a library smdebug which allows you to capture these tensors and save them for analysis. It’s highly customizable and allows to save the specific tensors you want at different frequencies and possibly with other configurations. Refer DeveloperGuide for details on how to use Amazon SageMaker Debugger library with your choice of framework in your training script. Here we have an example script orchestrated at src/tf_keras_resnet_byoc.py. In addition to this, you will need to ensure that your container has the smdebug library installed in this case, and specify your container image URI when creating the SageMaker Estimator below. Please refer SageMaker Documentation on how to do that.

Analysis of tensors

Amazon SageMaker Debugger can be configured to run debugging Rules on the tensors saved from the training job. At a very broad level, a rule is Python code used to detect certain conditions during training. Some of the conditions that a data scientist training an algorithm may care about are monitoring for gradients getting too large or too small, detecting overfitting, and so on. Amazon SageMaker Debugger comes pre-packaged with certain built-in rules. Users can write their own rules using the APIs provided by Amazon SageMaker Debugger through the smdebug library. You can also analyze raw tensor data outside of the Rules construct in say, a SageMaker notebook, using these APIs. Please refer Analysis Developer Guide for more on these APIs.

Training TensorFlow Keras models with Amazon SageMaker Debugger

Amazon SageMaker TensorFlow as a framework

Train a TensorFlow Keras model in this notebook with Amazon Sagemaker Debugger enabled and monitor the training jobs with rules. This is done using Amazon SageMaker TensorFlow 1.15.0 Container as a framework

[2]:
import boto3
import os
import sagemaker
from sagemaker.tensorflow import TensorFlow

Import the libraries needed for the demo of Amazon SageMaker Debugger.

[4]:
from sagemaker.debugger import Rule, DebuggerHookConfig, TensorBoardOutputConfig, CollectionConfig
import smdebug_rulesconfig as rule_configs

Now define the entry point for the training script

[5]:
# define the entrypoint script
entrypoint_script = "src/tf_keras_resnet_zerocodechange.py"

Setting up the Estimator

Now it’s time to setup our SageMaker TensorFlow Estimator. There are new parameters with the estimator to enable your training job for debugging through Amazon SageMaker Debugger. These new parameters are explained below

  • debugger_hook_config: This new parameter accepts a local path where you wish your tensors to be written to and also accepts the S3 URI where you wish your tensors to be uploaded to. It also accepts CollectionConfigurations which specify which tensors will be saved from the training job.

  • rules: This new parameter will accept a list of rules you wish to evaluate against the tensors output by this training job. For rules,

Amazon SageMaker Debugger supports two types of rules * Amazon SageMaker Rules: These are rules curated by the Amazon SageMaker team and you can choose to evaluate them against your training job. * Custom Rules: You can optionally choose to write your own rule as a Python source file and have it evaluated against your training job. To provide SageMaker Debugger to evaluate this rule, you would have to provide the S3 location of the rule source and the evaluator image.

Creating your own custom rule

Let us look at how you can create your custom rule briefly before proceeding to use it with your training job. Please see the documentation to learn more about structuring your rules and other related concepts.

Summary of what the custom rule evaluates

For demonstration purposes, below is a rule that tries to track whether gradients are too large. The custom rule looks at the tensors in the collection “gradients” saved during training and attempt to get the absolute value of the gradients in each step of the training. If the mean of the absolute values of gradients in any step is greater than a specified threshold, mark the rule as ‘triggering’. Let us look at how to structure the rule source.

Any custom rule logic you want to be evaluated should extend the Rule interface provided by Amazon SageMaker Debugger

from smdebug.rules.rule import Rule

class CustomGradientRule(Rule):

Now implement the class methods for the rule. Doing this allows Amazon SageMaker to understand the intent of the rule and evaluate it against your training tensors.

Rule class constructor

In order for Amazon SageMaker to instantiate your rule, your rule class constructor must conform to the following signature.

def __init__(self, base_trial, other_trials, <other parameters>)

Arguments

  • base_trial (Trial): This defines the primary Trial that your rule is anchored to. This is an object of class type Trial.

  • other_trials (list[Trial]): (Optional) This defines a list of ‘other’ trials you want your rule to look at. This is useful in the scenarios when you’re comparing tensors from the base_trial to tensors from some other trials.

  • <other parameters>: This is similar to **kwargs where you can pass in however many string parameters in your constructor signature. Note that SageMaker would only be able to support supplying string types for these values at runtime (see how, later).

Defining the rule logic to be invoked at each step:

This defines the logic to invoked for each step. Essentially, this is where you decide whether the rule should trigger or not. In this case, you’re concerned about the gradients getting too large. So, get the tensor reduction “mean” for each step and see if it’s value is larger than a threshold.

def invoke_at_step(self, step):
    for tname in self.base_trial.tensor_names(collection="gradients"):
        t = self.base_trial.tensor(tname)
        abs_mean = t.reduction_value(step, "mean", abs=True)
        if abs_mean > self.threshold:
            return True
    return False

Using your custom rule with SageMaker Estimator

Below we create the rule configuration using the Rule.custom method, and then pass it to the SageMaker TensorFlow estimator to kick off the job. Note that you need to pass the rule evaluator container image for custom rules. Please refer AWS Documentation on SageMaker documentation to find the image URI for your region. We will soon have this be automatically taken care of by the SageMaker SDK. You can also provide your own image, please refer to this repository for instructions on how to build such a container.

[21]:
custom_rule = Rule.custom(
    name="MyCustomRule",  # used to identify the rule
    # rule evaluator container image
    image_uri="759209512951.dkr.ecr.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/sagemaker-debugger-rule-evaluator:latest",
    instance_type="ml.t3.medium",  # instance type to run the rule evaluation on
    source="rules/my_custom_rule.py",  # path to the rule source file
    rule_to_invoke="CustomGradientRule",  # name of the class to invoke in the rule source file
    volume_size_in_gb=30,  # EBS volume size required to be attached to the rule evaluation instance
    collections_to_save=[CollectionConfig("gradients")],
    # collections to be analyzed by the rule. since this is a first party collection we fetch it as above
    rule_parameters={
        "threshold": "20.0"  # this will be used to intialize 'threshold' param in your constructor
    },
)

Before you proceed and create our training job, let us take a closer look at the parameters used to create the Rule configuration above:

  • name: This is used to identify this particular rule among the suite of rules you specified to be evaluated.

  • image_uri: This is the image of the container that has the logic of understanding your custom rule sources and evaluating them against the collections you save in the training job. You can get the list of open sourced SageMaker rule evaluator images here

  • instance_type: The type of the instance you want to run the rule evaluation on

  • source: This is the local path or the Amazon S3 URI of your rule source file.

  • rule_to_invoke: This specifies the particular Rule class implementation in your source file which you want to be evaluated. SageMaker supports only 1 rule to be evaluated at a time in a rule job. Your source file can have multiple Rule class implementations, though.

  • collections_to_save: This specifies which collections are necessary to be saved for this rule to run. Note that providing this collection does not necessarily mean the rule will actually use these collections. You might want to take such parameters for the rule through the next argument rule_parameters.

  • rule_parameters: This provides the runtime values of the parameter in your constructor. You can still choose to pass in other values which may be necessary for your rule to be evaluated. Any value in this map is available as an environment variable and can be accessed by your rule script using $<rule_parameter_key>

You can read more about custom rule evaluation in Amazon SageMaker in this documentation

Let us now create the estimator and call fit() on our estimator to start the training job and rule evaluation job in parallel.

[ ]:
estimator = TensorFlow(
    role=sagemaker.get_execution_role(),
    base_job_name="smdebug-custom-rule-demo-tf-keras",
    train_instance_count=1,
    train_instance_type="ml.p2.xlarge",
    entry_point=entrypoint_script,
    framework_version="1.15",
    py_version="py3",
    train_max_run=3600,
    script_mode=True,
    ## New parameter
    rules=[custom_rule],
)

# After calling fit, Amazon SageMaker starts one training job and one rule job for you.
# The rule evaluation status is visible in the training logs
# at regular intervals

estimator.fit(wait=False)

Result

As a result of calling the fit(wait=False), two jobs were kicked off in the background. Amazon SageMaker Debugger kicked off a rule evaluation job for our custom gradient logic in parallel with the training job. You can review the status of the above rule job as follows.

[ ]:
import time

status = estimator.latest_training_job.rule_job_summary()
while status[0]["RuleEvaluationStatus"] == "InProgress":
    status = estimator.latest_training_job.rule_job_summary()
    print(status)
    time.sleep(10)

Once the rule job starts and you see the RuleEvaluationJobArn above, we can see the logs for the rule job in Cloudwatch. To do that, we’ll use this utlity function to get a link to the rule job logs.

[ ]:
def _get_rule_job_name(training_job_name, rule_configuration_name, rule_job_arn):
    """Helper function to get the rule job name with correct casing"""
    return "{}-{}-{}".format(
        training_job_name[:26], rule_configuration_name[:26], rule_job_arn[-8:]
    )


def _get_cw_url_for_rule_job(rule_job_name, region):
    return "https://{}.console.aws.amazon.com/cloudwatch/home?region={}#logStream:group=/aws/sagemaker/ProcessingJobs;prefix={};streamFilter=typeLogStreamPrefix".format(
        region, region, rule_job_name
    )


def get_rule_jobs_cw_urls(estimator):
    training_job = estimator.latest_training_job
    training_job_name = training_job.describe()["TrainingJobName"]
    rule_eval_statuses = training_job.describe()["DebugRuleEvaluationStatuses"]

    result = {}
    for status in rule_eval_statuses:
        if status.get("RuleEvaluationJobArn", None) is not None:
            rule_job_name = _get_rule_job_name(
                training_job_name, status["RuleConfigurationName"], status["RuleEvaluationJobArn"]
            )
            result[status["RuleConfigurationName"]] = _get_cw_url_for_rule_job(
                rule_job_name, boto3.Session().region_name
            )
    return result


get_rule_jobs_cw_urls(estimator)

Notebook CI Test Results

This notebook was tested in multiple regions. The test results are as follows, except for us-west-2 which is shown at the top of the notebook.

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