transformers/examples/flax/vision/README.md

Image Classification training examples

The following example showcases how to train/fine-tune ViT for image-classification using the JAX/Flax backend.

JAX/Flax allows you to trace pure functions and compile them into efficient, fused accelerator code on both GPU and TPU. Models written in JAX/Flax are immutable and updated in a purely functional way which enables simple and efficient model parallelism.

In this example we will train/fine-tune the model on the imagenette dataset.

Prepare the dataset

We will use the imagenette dataset to train/fine-tune our model. Imagenette is a subset of 10 easily classified classes from Imagenet (tench, English springer, cassette player, chain saw, church, French horn, garbage truck, gas pump, golf ball, parachute).

Download and extract the data.

wget https://s3.amazonaws.com/fast-ai-imageclas/imagenette2.tgz
tar -xvzf imagenette2.tgz

This will create a imagenette2 dir with two subdirectories train and val each with multiple subdirectories per class. The training script expects the following directory structure

root/dog/xxx.png
root/dog/xxy.png
root/dog/[...]/xxz.png

root/cat/123.png
root/cat/nsdf3.png
root/cat/[...]/asd932_.png

Train the model

Next we can run the example script to fine-tune the model:

python run_image_classification.py \
    --output_dir ./vit-base-patch16-imagenette \
    --model_name_or_path google/vit-base-patch16-224-in21k \
    --train_dir="imagenette2/train" \
    --validation_dir="imagenette2/val" \
    --num_train_epochs 5 \
    --learning_rate 1e-3 \
    --per_device_train_batch_size 128 --per_device_eval_batch_size 128 \
    --overwrite_output_dir \
    --preprocessing_num_workers 32 \
    --push_to_hub

This should finish in ~7mins with 99% validation accuracy.