Visual editor for a model architecture

[Artem Yankov]

Hello,

I'd love to have a sanity check on the idea for the tool I'm thinking to make.

I've been playing with Caffe and convnets for the first time (and in the context of a Kaggle competition).
Fiddling with the parameters (especially architectural) by editing text file is very painful process: you add one
element, check the score, then try another idea, then another, then you are not sure what is your current network look like
and you have to go over the prototxt file to figure out. It is also prone to mistakes: you have to edit a lot of text and jump through the file
back and forth and keep track of what you've tried. I might be missing something though and you guys might developed a good routine (please share if so)?

What I was thinking, is that it should be pretty easy to make a simple visual editor, where you would just drop layers on the canvas, connect them together,
choose their parameters and then click a button to generate a prototxt file. It could go even further and allow you to actually run the model and then plot the loss
right here, save models you edited, etc. This thing could just run in the browser, by using js and d3 should not be hard to create such a tool.

Does it make sense and could it be really useful? Or maybe it was done already or somebody already is working on a similar thing?

[J. Yegerlehner]

Hi Artem,

Yes it's a good idea. I think there are a few related projects discussed here:

https://github.com/BVLC/caffe/issues/481

in particular this sounds like what you describe:

https://github.com/Chasvortex/caffe-gui-tool

I haven't any of them yet and don't know what state they are in.

Jim

[Armin Kappeler]

Maybe have a look at DIGITS from NVIDIA.

https://developer.nvidia.com/digits

It is based on caffe. It might just be what you are looking for. I never used it, but it looks very promising

[J. Yegerlehner]

On Friday, April 10, 2015 at 12:23:41 PM UTC-5, Armin Kappeler wrote:

Maybe have a look at DIGITS from NVIDIA.

https://developer.nvidia.com/digits

That's one of the projects mentioned on the link I provided, but I didn't mention it in particular because it does not provide a facility for visually edting the layer DAG prototxt. At least yet.

[Artem Yankov]

Thanks for the links guys. Checking everything out. Digits does not have a visual editor indeed, but it plots 

loss and accuracy. caffe-gui tool looks interesting too although author uses somewhat heavyweight technology 

for drawing the network. 

[Luke Yeager]

You're right that there's not a visual design tool yet, but it's in the works: https://github.com/NVIDIA/DIGITS/issues/60 

On Friday, April 10, 2015 at 12:43:02 PM UTC-7, J. Yegerlehner wrote: