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Biggest productivity boosters for me:

- devdocs.io for pytorch

- conda for packaging w CUDA

- einops

- tensorboard

- huggingface datasets

Interesting models/structures:

- resnet

- unet

- transformers

- convnext

- vision transformers

- ddpm

- novel optimizers

- generative flow nets

- “your classifier is secretly an energy-based model and yiu should treat it like one” paper

- self-supervision

- distance metric learning

Places where you can read implementations:

- lucidrains’ github

- timm computer vision models library

- fastai

- labml (annotated quite nicely)

Biggest foreseeable headaches:

- not suuper easy to do test-driven development

- data normalization (floating point error, not using eg batchnorm)

- sensitivity of model performance to (hyper)params (layer sizes, learning rates, optimizer, etc)

- impatience

- lack of data

I’d also recommend watching Mark Saroufim live code in PyTorch, on YouTube. My 2 cents, you can only get really fast as well as good at this with a lot of experience. A lot of rules-of-thumb have to come together just right for the whole system to work.



Early days, but trying to solve the lack of data problem with a project called "Oxen".

At it's core it's a data version control system. Built from the ground up to handle the size and scale of some of these ML datasets (unlike git-lfs or DVC which I have found to be relatively slow and hard to work with). Also building out a web hub similar to GitHub to collaborate on the data with a nice UI.

Would love any feedback on the project as it grows! Here's the github repo:

https://github.com/Oxen-AI/oxen-release#-oxen


thanks!




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