Avalanche has been designed for extreme portability and usability. Indeed, it can be run on every OS and native python environment. 💻🍎🐧

📦 Install Avalanche with Pip

you can install Avalanche with pip:

This will install the core version of Avalanche, without extra packages (e.g., object detection support, reinforcement learning support). To install all the extra packages run:

You can install also specific extra packages by specifying the appropriate code name within the square brackets. This is the complete list of options:

Avalanche will raise an error if you need one extra package and will suggest the appropriate package to install.

Note that in some alternatives to bash like zsh you may need to enclose `avalanche-lib[code]` into quotation marks ( " " ), since square brackets are used as special characters.

Warning: by installing the [all] and [extra] versions, the PyTorch version may be limited to <2.* due to the dependencies of those additional packages.

📥 Install the Master Branch Using Pip

If you want, you can install Avalanche directly from the master branch (latest version) in a single command. Make sure to have pytorch already installed in your environment, then execute

To update avalanche to the latest version, uninstall the package with pip uninstall avalanche-lib and then execute again the pip install command.

💻 Developer Mode Install

To help us to expand and improve Avalanche, you can install Avalanche in a fresh environment with the command

pip install -e ".[dev]"

This will install in editable mode, so that you can develop and modify the installed Avalanche package. It will also install the "extra" dev dependencies necessary to run tests and build the documentation.

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

You can run this chapter and play with it on Google Colaboratory:

Avalanche is a framework in constant development. Thanks to the support of the ContinualAI community and its active members we plan to extend its features and improve its usability based on the demands of our research community! A the moment, Avalanche is in Beta (v0.3.1). We support a large number of Benchmarks, Strategies and Metrics, that makes it, we believe, the best tool out there for your continual learning research! 💪

Benchmarks and Datasets

You find a complete list of the features on the benchmarks API documentation.

🖼️ Datasets

Avalanche supports all the most popular computer vision datasets used in Continual Learning. Some of them are available in Torchvision, while other have been integrated by us. Most datasets can be automatically downloaded by Avalanche.

• Toy datasets: MNIST, Fashion MNIST, KMNIST, EMNIST, QMNIST.

• CIFAR: CIFAR10, CIFAR100.

• ImageNet: TinyImagenet, MiniImagenet, Imagenet.

• Others: EndlessCLDataset, CUB200, OpenLORIS, Stream-51, INATURALIST2018, Omniglot, CLEARImage, ...

📚 Benchmarks

All the major continual learning benchmarks are available and ready to use. Benchmarks split the datasets and create the train and test streams:

• MNIST: SplitMNIST, RotatedMNIST, PermutedMNIST, SplitFashionMNIST.

• CIFAR10: SplitCIFAR10, SplitCIFAR100, SplitCIFAR110.

• CORe50: all the CORe50 scenarios are supported.

• Others: SplitCUB200, CLStream51, CLEAR.

📈 Continual Learning Strategies

Avalanche provides Continual Learning algorithms (strategies). We are continuously expanding the library with new algorithms and making sure they can reproduce seminal papers results in the sibling project CL-Baselines.

• Baselines: Naive, JointTraining, Cumulative.

• Rehearsal: Replay with reservoir sampling and balanced buffers, GSS greedy, CoPE, Generative Replay.

• Regularization: EWC, LwF, GEM, AGEM, CWR*, Synaptic Intelligence, MAS.

• Architectural: Progressive Neural Networks, multi-head, incremental classifier.

• Others: GDumb, iCaRL, AR1, Streaming LDA, LFL.

Models

Avalanche uses and extends pytorch nn.Module to define continual learning models:

• support for nn.Modules and torchvision models.

• Dynamic output heads for class-incremental scenarios and multi heads for task-incremental scenarios.

• support for architectural strategies and dynamically expanding models such as progressive neural networks.

📊 Metrics and Evaluation

Avalanche provides continuous evaluation of CL strategies with a large set of Metrics. They are collected and logged automatically by the strategy during the training and evaluation loops.

• Standard Performance Metrics: accuracy, loss, confusion (averaged over streams or experiences).

• CL-Metrics: backward/forward transfer, forgetting.

• Computational Resources: CPU and RAM usage, MAC, execution times.

and many more.

Welcome to the "Introduction" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. We will start our journey by taking a quick look at the Avalanche main modules to understand its general architecture.

As hinted in the getting started introduction Avalanche is organized in five main modules:

• Benchmarks: This module maintains a uniform API for data handling: mostly generating a stream of data from one or more datasets. It contains all the major CL benchmarks (similar to what has been done for torchvision).

• Training: This module provides all the necessary utilities concerning model training. This includes simple and efficient ways of implement new continual learning strategies as well as a set pre-implemented CL baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms you will be able to use for comparison!

• Evaluation: This module provides all the utilities and metrics that can help evaluate a CL algorithm with respect to all the factors we believe to be important for a continually learning system. It also includes advanced logging and plotting features, including native Tensorboard support.

• Models: In this module you'll find several model architectures and pre-trained models that can be used for your continual learning experiment (similar to what has been done in torchvision.models). Furthermore, we provide everything you need to implement architectural strategies, task-aware models, and dynamic model expansion.

• Logging: It includes advanced logging and plotting features, including native stdout, file and Tensorboard support (How cool it is to have a complete, interactive dashboard, tracking your experiment metrics in real-time with a single line of code?)

Avalanche
├── Benchmarks
│   ├── Classic
│   ├── Datasets
│   ├── Generators
│   ├── Scenarios
│   └── Utils
├── Evaluation
│   ├── Metrics
│   ├── Tensorboard
|   └── Utils
├── Training
│   ├── Strategies
│   ├── Plugins
|   └── Utils
├── Models
└── Loggers

In this series of tutorials, you'll get the chance to learn in-depth all the features offered by each module and sub-module of Avalanche, how to put them together and how to master Avalanche, for a stress-free continual learning prototyping experience!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Avalanche was born within ContinualAI with a clear goal in mind:

Pushing Continual Learning to the next level, providing a shared and collaborative library for fast prototyping, training and reproducible evaluation of continual learning algorithms.

As a powerful avalanche, a Continual Learning agent incrementally improves its knowledge and skills over time, building upon the previously acquired ones and learning how to interact with the external world.

We hope Avalanche may trigger the same positive reinforcement loop within our community, moving towards a more collaborative and inclusive way of doing research and helping us tackle bigger problems, faster and better, but together! 👪

💪The Avalanche Advantage

Avalanche has several advantages:

• Shared & Coherent Codebase: Aren't you tired of re-inventing the wheel in continual learning? We are. Re-producing paper results has always been daunting in machine learning and it is even more so in continual learning. Avalanche makes you stop re-write your (and other people) code all over again with a coherent and shared codebase that provides already all the utilities, benchmark, metrics and baselines you may need for your next great continual learning research project!

• Errors Reduction: The more code we write, the more bugs we introduce in our code. This is the rule, not the exception. Avalanche, let you focus on what really matters: defining your CL solution. Benchmarks preparation to training, evaluation and comparison with other methods will be already there for you. This in turn, massively reduce the amount of errors introduced and the time needed to debug your code.

• Faster Prototyping: As researchers or data scientists, we have dozens ideas every day and time is always too little to execute them. However, if we think about it, most of the time spent in bringing our ideas to life is consumed in installing software, preparing and cleaning our data, preparing the experiments code infrastructure and so on. Avalanche lets you focus just on the original algorithmic proposal, taking care of most of the rest!

• Improved Reproducibility & Portability: One of the great features of Avalanche, is the possibility of reproducing experimental results easily and on any OS. Researchers can simply plug-in their algorithm into the codebase and see how it goes with respect of other researchers' methods. Their algorithm in turn, is used as a baseline for other methods, creating a virtuous circle. This is only possible thanks to the simple, yet powerful idea of providing shared benchmarks, training and evaluation in a single place.

• Improved Modularity: Avalanche has been designed with modularity in mind. As you will learn more about Avalanche, you will realize we have sometimes forego simplicity in favor of modularity and reusability (we hate code replication as you do 🤪). However, we believe this will help us scale in the near future as we collaboratively bring this codebase into maturity.

• Increased Efficiency & Scalability: Full-stack researchers & data scientists know this, making your algorithm memory and computationally efficient is tough. Avalanche is already optimized for you, so that you can run your ImageNet continual learning experiment on your 8GB laptop (buy a cooling fan 💨) or even try it on embedded devices of your latest product!

But most of all, Avalanche, can help us standardize our field and work better together, more collaboratively, towards our shared goal of making machines learn over time like humans do.

Avalanche the first experiment of a End-to-end Library for reproducible continual learning research where you can find benchmarks, algorithms, evaluation utilities and much more in the same place.

Let's make it together 👫 a wonderful ride! 🎈

A Short Guide for Researchers on the Run

Avalanche is mostly about making the life of a continual learning researcher easier.

Below, you can see the main Avalanche modules and how they interact with each other.

What are the three pillars of any respectful continual learning research project?

1. Benchmarks: Machine learning researchers need multiple benchmarks with efficient data handling utils to design and prototype new algorithms. Quantitative results on ever-changing benchmarks has been one of the driving forces of Deep Learning.

2. Training: Efficient implementation and training of continual learning algorithms; comparisons with other baselines and state-of-the-art methods become fundamental to asses the quality of an original algorithmic proposal.

3. Evaluation: Training utils and Benchmarks are not enough alone to push continual learning research forward. Comprehensive and sound evaluation protocols and metrics need to be employed as well.

With Avalanche, you can find all these three fundamental pieces together and much more, in a single and coherent, well-maintained codebase.

Let's take a quick tour on how you can use Avalanche for your research projects with a 5-minutes guide, for researchers on the run!

Let's first install Avalanche. Please, check out our How to Install guide for further details.

!pip install avalanche-lib[all]
!pip show avalanche-lib

🏛️ General Architecture

Avalanche is organized in five main modules:

1. Benchmarks: This module maintains a uniform API for data handling: mostly generating a stream of data from one or more datasets. It contains all the major CL benchmarks (similar to what has been done for torchvision).

2. Training: This module provides all the necessary utilities concerning model training. This includes simple and efficient ways of implement new continual learning strategies as well as a set pre-implemented CL baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms you will be able to use for comparison!

3. Evaluation: This modules provides all the utilities and metrics that can help in evaluating a CL algorithm with respect to all the factors we believe to be important for a continually learning system.

4. Models: In this module you'll be able to find several model architectures and pre-trained models that can be used for your continual learning experiment (similar to what has been done in torchvision.models).

5. Logging: It includes advanced logging and plotting features, including native stdout, file and Tensorboard support (How cool it is to have a complete, interactive dashboard, tracking your experiment metrics in real-time with a single line of code?)

In the graphic below, you can see how Avalanche sub-modules are available and organized as well:

Avalanche
├── Benchmarks
│   ├── Classic
│   ├── Datasets
│   ├── Generators
│   ├── Scenarios
│   └── Utils
├── Evaluation
│   ├── Metrics
|   └── Utils
├── Training
│   ├── Strategies
│   ├── Plugins
|   └── Utils
├── Models
└── Loggers

We will learn more about each of them during this tutorial series, but keep in mind that the [Avalanche API documentation](https://avalanche-api.continualai.org/en/latest/) is your friend as well!

All right, let's start with the benchmarks module right away 👇

📚 Benchmarks

The benchmark module offers three main features:

1. Datasets: a comprehensive list of PyTorch Datasets ready to use (It includes all the Torchvision Datasets and more!).

2. Classic Benchmarks: a set of classic Continual Learning Benchmarks ready to be used (there can be multiple benchmarks based on a single dataset).

3. Generators: a set of functions you can use to generate your own benchmark starting from any PyTorch Dataset!

Datasets

Datasets can be imported in Avalanche as simply as:

from avalanche.benchmarks.datasets import MNIST, FashionMNIST, KMNIST, EMNIST, \
    QMNIST, FakeData, CocoCaptions, CocoDetection, LSUN, ImageNet, CIFAR10, \
    CIFAR100, STL10, SVHN, PhotoTour, SBU, Flickr8k, Flickr30k, VOCDetection, \
    VOCSegmentation, Cityscapes, SBDataset, USPS, HMDB51, UCF101, CelebA, \
    CORe50Dataset, TinyImagenet, CUB200, OpenLORIS, MiniImageNetDataset, \
    Stream51, CLEARDataset

Of course, you can use them as you would use any PyTorch Dataset.

Benchmarks Basics

The Avalanche benchmarks (instances of the Scenario class), contains several attributes that describe the benchmark. However, the most important ones are the train and test streams.

In Avalanche we often suppose to have access to these two parallel stream of data (even though some benchmarks may not provide such feature, but contain just a unique test set).

Each of these streams are iterable, indexable and sliceable objects that are composed of experiences. Experiences are batch of data (or "tasks") that can be provided with or without a specific task label.

Classic Benchmarks

Avalanche maintains a set of commonly used benchmarks built on top of one or multiple datasets.

from avalanche.benchmarks.classic import CORe50, SplitTinyImageNet, SplitCIFAR10, \
    SplitCIFAR100, SplitCIFAR110, SplitMNIST, RotatedMNIST, PermutedMNIST, SplitCUB200

# creating the benchmark (scenario object)
perm_mnist = PermutedMNIST(
    n_experiences=3,
    seed=1234,
)

# recovering the train and test streams
train_stream = perm_mnist.train_stream
test_stream = perm_mnist.test_stream

# iterating over the train stream
for experience in train_stream:
    print("Start of task ", experience.task_label)
    print('Classes in this task:', experience.classes_in_this_experience)

    # The current Pytorch training set can be easily recovered through the 
    # experience
    current_training_set = experience.dataset
    # ...as well as the task_label
    print('Task {}'.format(experience.task_label))
    print('This task contains', len(current_training_set), 'training examples')

    # we can recover the corresponding test experience in the test stream
    current_test_set = test_stream[experience.current_experience].dataset
    print('This task contains', len(current_test_set), 'test examples')

Benchmarks Generators

What if we want to create a new benchmark that is not present in the "Classic" ones? Well, in that case Avalanche offers a number of utilities that you can use to create your own benchmark with maximum flexibility: the benchmark generators!

The specific scenario generators are useful when starting from one or multiple PyTorch datasets and you want to create a "New Instances" or "New Classes" benchmark: i.e. it supports the easy and flexible creation of a Domain-Incremental, Class-Incremental or Task-Incremental scenarios among others.

from avalanche.benchmarks.generators import nc_benchmark, ni_benchmark
from torchvision.datasets import MNIST

mnist_train = MNIST('.', train=True, download=True)
mnist_test = MNIST('.', train=False)

benchmark = ni_benchmark(
    mnist_train, mnist_test, n_experiences=10, shuffle=True, seed=1234,
    balance_experiences=True
)
benchmark = nc_benchmark(
    mnist_train, mnist_test, n_experiences=10, shuffle=True, seed=1234,
    task_labels=False
)

Finally, if your ideal benchmark does not fit well in the aforementioned Domain-Incremental, Class-Incremental or Task-Incremental scenarios, you can always use our generic generators:

• filelist_benchmark

• paths_benchmark

• dataset_benchmark

• tensors_benchmark

from avalanche.benchmarks.generators import filelist_benchmark, dataset_benchmark, \
                                            tensors_benchmark, paths_benchmark

You can read more about how to use them the full Benchmarks module tutorial!

💪 Training

The training module in Avalanche is build on modularity and it has two main goals:

1. provide a set of standard continual learning baselines that can be easily run for comparison;

2. provide the necessary utilities to implement and run your own strategy in the most efficient and simple way possible thanks to the building blocks we already prepared for you.

Strategies

If you want to compare your strategy with other classic continual learning algorithms or baselines, in Avalanche this is as simple as creating an object:

from avalanche.models import SimpleMLP
from avalanche.training import Naive, CWRStar, Replay, GDumb, \
    Cumulative, LwF, GEM, AGEM, EWC, AR1
from torch.optim import SGD
from torch.nn import CrossEntropyLoss

model = SimpleMLP(num_classes=10)
cl_strategy = Naive(
    model, SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, momentum=0.9),
    CrossEntropyLoss(), train_mb_size=100, train_epochs=4, eval_mb_size=100
)

Create your own Strategy

The simplest way to build your own strategy is to create a python class that implements the main train and eval methods.

Let's define our Continual Learning algorithm "MyStrategy" as a simple python class:

from torch.utils.data import DataLoader

class MyStrategy():
    """My Basic Strategy"""

    def __init__(self, model, optimizer, criterion):
        self.model = model
        self.optimizer = optimizer
        self.criterion = criterion

    def train(self, experience):
        # here you can implement your own training loop for each experience (i.e. 
        # batch or task).

        train_dataset = experience.dataset
        t = experience.task_label
        train_data_loader = DataLoader(
            train_dataset, num_workers=4, batch_size=128
        )

        for epoch in range(1):
            for mb in train_data_loader:
                # you magin here...
                pass

    def eval(self, experience):
        # here you can implement your own eval loop for each experience (i.e. 
        # batch or task).

        eval_dataset = experience.dataset
        t = experience.task_label
        eval_data_loader = DataLoader(
            eval_dataset, num_workers=4, batch_size=128
        )

        # eval here

Then, we can use our strategy as we would do for the pre-implemented ones:

from avalanche.models import SimpleMLP
from avalanche.benchmarks import SplitMNIST

# Benchmark creation
benchmark = SplitMNIST(n_experiences=5)

# Model Creation
model = SimpleMLP(num_classes=benchmark.n_classes)

# Create the Strategy Instance (MyStrategy)
cl_strategy = MyStrategy(
    model, SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, momentum=0.9),
    CrossEntropyLoss())

# Training Loop
print('Starting experiment...')

for exp_id, experience in enumerate(benchmark.train_stream):
    print("Start of experience ", experience.current_experience)

    cl_strategy.train(experience)
    print('Training completed')

    print('Computing accuracy on the current test set')
    cl_strategy.eval(benchmark.test_stream[exp_id])

While this is the easiest possible way to add your own strategy, Avalanche supports more sophisticated modalities (based on callbacks) that lets you write more neat, modular and reusable code, inheriting functionality from a parent classes and using pre-implemented plugins.

Check out more details about what Avalanche can offer in this module following the "Training" chapter of the "From Zero to Hero" tutorial!

📈 Evaluation

The evaluation module is quite straightforward: it offers all the basic functionalities to evaluate and keep track of a continual learning experiment.

This is mostly done through the Metrics and the Loggers. The Metrics provide a set of classes which implements the main continual learning metrics like Accuracy, Forgetting, Memory Usage, Running Times, etc. Metrics should be created via the utility functions (e.g. accuracy_metrics, timing_metrics and others) specifying in the arguments when those metrics should be computed (after each minibatch, epoch, experience etc...). The Loggers specify a way to report the metrics (e.g. with Tensorboard, on console or others). Loggers are created by instantiating the respective class.

Metrics and loggers interact via the Evaluation Plugin: this is the main object responsible of tracking the experiment progress. Metrics and loggers are directly passed to the EvaluationPlugin instance. You will see the output of the loggers automatically during training and evaluation! Let's see how to put this together in few lines of code:

# utility functions to create plugin metrics
from avalanche.evaluation.metrics import accuracy_metrics, loss_metrics, forgetting_metrics
from avalanche.logging import InteractiveLogger, TensorboardLogger
from avalanche.training.plugins import EvaluationPlugin

eval_plugin = EvaluationPlugin(
    # accuracy after each training epoch
    # and after each evaluation experience
    accuracy_metrics(epoch=True, experience=True),
    # loss after each training minibatch and each
    # evaluation stream
    loss_metrics(minibatch=True, stream=True),
    # catastrophic forgetting after each evaluation
    # experience
    forgetting_metrics(experience=True, stream=True), 
    # add as many metrics as you like
    loggers=[InteractiveLogger(), TensorboardLogger()])

# pass the evaluation plugin instance to the strategy
# strategy = EWC(..., evaluator=eval_plugin)

# THAT'S IT!!

For more details about the evaluation module (how to write new metrics/loggers, a deeper tutorial on metrics) check out the extended guide in the "Evaluation" chapter of the "From Zero to Hero" Avalanche tutorial!

🔗 Putting all Together

You've learned how to install Avalanche, how to create benchmarks that can suit your needs, how you can create your own continual learning algorithm and how you can evaluate its performance.

Here we show how you can use all these modules together to design your experiments as quantitative supporting evidence for your research project or paper.

from avalanche.benchmarks.classic import SplitMNIST
from avalanche.evaluation.metrics import forgetting_metrics, accuracy_metrics,\
    loss_metrics, timing_metrics, cpu_usage_metrics, StreamConfusionMatrix,\
    disk_usage_metrics, gpu_usage_metrics
from avalanche.models import SimpleMLP
from avalanche.logging import InteractiveLogger, TextLogger, TensorboardLogger
from avalanche.training.plugins import EvaluationPlugin
from avalanche.training import Naive

from torch.optim import SGD
from torch.nn import CrossEntropyLoss

benchmark = SplitMNIST(n_experiences=5)

# MODEL CREATION
model = SimpleMLP(num_classes=benchmark.n_classes)

# DEFINE THE EVALUATION PLUGIN and LOGGERS
# The evaluation plugin manages the metrics computation.
# It takes as argument a list of metrics, collectes their results and returns 
# them to the strategy it is attached to.

# log to Tensorboard
tb_logger = TensorboardLogger()

# log to text file
text_logger = TextLogger(open('log.txt', 'a'))

# print to stdout
interactive_logger = InteractiveLogger()

eval_plugin = EvaluationPlugin(
    accuracy_metrics(minibatch=True, epoch=True, experience=True, stream=True),
    loss_metrics(minibatch=True, epoch=True, experience=True, stream=True),
    timing_metrics(epoch=True),
    cpu_usage_metrics(experience=True),
    forgetting_metrics(experience=True, stream=True),
    StreamConfusionMatrix(num_classes=benchmark.n_classes, save_image=False),
    disk_usage_metrics(minibatch=True, epoch=True, experience=True, stream=True),
    loggers=[interactive_logger, text_logger, tb_logger]
)

# CREATE THE STRATEGY INSTANCE (NAIVE)
cl_strategy = Naive(
    model, SGD(model.parameters(), lr=0.001, momentum=0.9),
    CrossEntropyLoss(), train_mb_size=500, train_epochs=1, eval_mb_size=100,
    evaluator=eval_plugin)

# TRAINING LOOP
print('Starting experiment...')
results = []
for experience in benchmark.train_stream:
    print("Start of experience: ", experience.current_experience)
    print("Current Classes: ", experience.classes_in_this_experience)

    # train returns a dictionary which contains all the metric values
    res = cl_strategy.train(experience, num_workers=4)
    print('Training completed')

    print('Computing accuracy on the whole test set')
    # eval also returns a dictionary which contains all the metric values
    results.append(cl_strategy.eval(benchmark.test_stream, num_workers=4))

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Welcome to the "Putting All Together" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. In this part we will summarize the major Avalanche features and how you can put them together for your continual learning experiments.

🛴 A Comprehensive Example

Here we report a complete example of the Avalanche usage:

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

]--- description: How to Contribute Back to the Avalanche Community

Contribute to Avalanche

The last step towards becoming a real continual learning super-hero ⚡ is to fall into a radioactive dump.☢️ Just kidding, it's much easier than that: you need to contribute back to Avalanche!

There are no superheroes that are not altruistic!

First of all, if you haven't already. After you've familiarized with the Avalanche codebase you have two roads ahead of you:

1. You can start working on a (we have dozen of them!)

2. You can and propose yourself to work on it.

In any of the two cases you'd need to follow the steps below:

2. ⭐_Star_ + 👁️_watch_ the repository.

3. Fork the repository.

4. Create or assign an existing issue/feature to yourself.

5. Make your changes.

The following rules should be respected:

• Always pull before pushing a commit.

• Try to assign to yourself one issue at a time.

• Try closing an issue within roughly 7 days. If you are not able to do that, please break it down into multiple ones you can tackle more easily, or you can always remove your assignment to the issue!

• If you add a new feature, please include also a test and a usage example in your PR.

Also, before making your PR, first run the following command for code formatting with Black:

then, make sure that the following command returns no test errors:

Otherwise fix them and run these commands again until everything is working correctly. You should also check if everything is working on GPUs, using the env variable USE_GPU=True:

Faster integrity checks can be run with the env variable FAST_TEST=True :

Contribute to the Avalanche documentation

To contribute to the documentation you need to follow the steps below:

1. The notebooks are contained in the folder notebooks. The folder structure is specular to the documentation, so do not create or delete any folder.

2. Detect the notebook that you want to edit and do all the modifications 📝

3. Commit the changes and open a pull request (PR).

4. If your pull request will be accepted, your edited notebooks will be automatically converted and uploaded to the official Avalanche website 🎊!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Having learned how to use all the Avalanche main features, you may end up willing to customize the framework a little to suit your eagerness for continually better functionalities (as a true continual learner would indeed do! ⚡).

Hence, now is the time to get your hands dirty! 🙌

Take you time to explore the in great detail. We made sure everything is well documented (even if improvable), but try to take a look at the code as well to resolve any uncertainties (of course if you have any questions )

You can start by .

We suggest delving into the code using an appropriate IDE, such as . This will help you navigate the code better and with tons of cool discovery features. Once you have a clear understanding of the entire codebase (or at least the module you'd like to extend/customize) you can start making changes.

If you think your changes may be interesting for the rest of the Continual Learning community, why not contribute back to Avalanche? You can learn how to do it in the next chapter.

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

You can run this chapter and play with it on Google Colaboratory:

Avalanche is an End-to-End Continual Learning Library based on , born within with the goal of providing a shared and collaborative open-source (MIT licensed) codebase for fast prototyping, training and of continual learning algorithms.

Avalanche can help Continual Learning researchers and practitioners in several ways:

• Write less code, prototype faster & reduce errors

• Improve reproducibility, modularity and reusability

• Increase code efficiency, scalability & portability

• Augment impact and usability of your research products

The library is organized in five main modules:

• Training: This module provides all the necessary utilities concerning model training. This includes simple and efficient ways of implement new continual learning strategies as well as a set pre-implemented CL baselines and state-of-the-art algorithms you will be able to use for comparison!

• Evaluation: This modules provides all the utilities and metrics that can help evaluate a CL algorithm with respect to all the factors we believe to be important for a continually learning system.

Let's make it together 👫 a wonderful ride! 🎈

Check out how your code changes when you start using Avalanche! 👇

🚦 Getting Started

We know that learning a new tool may be tough at first. This is why we made Avalanche as easy as possible to learn with a set of resources that will help you along the way.

For example, you may start with our 5-minutes guide that will let you acquire the basics about Avalanche and how you can use it in your research project:

We have also prepared for you a large set of examples & snippets you can plug-in directly into your code and play with:

Having completed these two sections, you will already feel with superpowers ⚡, this is why we have also created an in-depth tutorial that will cover all the aspect of Avalanche in details and make you a true Continual Learner! 👨‍🎓️

📑 Cite Avalanche

🗂️ Maintained by ContinualAI Lab

Welcome to the "Training" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. In this part we will present the functionalities offered by the training module.

First, let's install Avalanche. You can skip this step if you have installed it already.

💪 The Training Module

The training module in Avalanche is designed with modularity in mind. Its main goals are to:

1. provide a set of popular continual learning baselines that can be easily used to run experimental comparisons;

2. provide simple abstractions to create and run your own strategy as efficiently and easily as possible starting from a couple of basic building blocks we already prepared for you.

At the moment, the training module includes three main components:

• Templates: these are high level abstractions used as a starting point to define the actual strategies. The templates contain already implemented basic utilities and functionalities shared by a group of strategies (e.g. the BaseSGDTemplate contains all the implemented methods to deal with strategies based on SGD).

• Strategies: these are popular baselines already implemented for you which you can use for comparisons or as base classes to define a custom strategy.

• Plugins: these are classes that allow adding some specific behavior to your own strategy. The plugin system allows defining reusable components which can be easily combined (e.g. a replay strategy, a regularization strategy). They are also used to automatically manage logging and evaluation.

Keep in mind that many Avalanche components are independent of Avalanche strategies. If you already have your own strategy which does not use Avalanche, you can use Avalanche's benchmarks, models, data loaders, and metrics without ever looking at Avalanche's strategies!

📈 How to Use Strategies & Plugins

If you want to compare your strategy with other classic continual learning algorithms or baselines, in Avalanche you can instantiate a strategy with a couple of lines of code.

Strategy Instantiation

Most strategies require only 3 mandatory arguments:

• model: this must be a torch.nn.Module.

• optimizer: torch.optim.Optimizer already initialized on your model.

• loss: a loss function such as those in torch.nn.functional.

Additional arguments are optional and allow you to customize training (batch size, number of epochs, ...) or strategy-specific parameters (memory size, regularization strength, ...).

Training & Evaluation

Each strategy object offers two main methods: train and eval. Both of them, accept either a single experience(Experience) or a list of them, for maximum flexibility.

We can train the model continually by iterating over the train_stream provided by the scenario.

Adding Plugins

Most continual learning strategies follow roughly the same training/evaluation loops, i.e. a simple naive strategy (a.k.a. finetuning) augmented with additional behavior to counteract catastrophic forgetting. The plugin systems in Avalanche is designed to easily augment continual learning strategies with custom behavior, without having to rewrite the training loop from scratch. Avalanche strategies accept an optional list of plugins that will be executed during the training/evaluation loops.

For example, early stopping is implemented as a plugin:

In Avalanche, most continual learning strategies are implemented using plugins, which makes it easy to combine them together. For example, it is extremely easy to create a hybrid strategy that combines replay and EWC together by passing the appropriate plugins list to the SupervisedTemplate:

Beware that most strategy plugins modify the internal state. As a result, not all the strategy plugins can be combined together. For example, it does not make sense to use multiple replay plugins since they will try to modify the same strategy variables (mini-batches, dataloaders), and therefore they will be in conflict.

📝 A Look Inside Avalanche Strategies

If you arrived at this point you already know how to use Avalanche strategies and are ready to use it. However, before making your own strategies you need to understand a little bit the internal implementation of the training and evaluation loops.

In Avalanche you can customize a strategy in 2 ways:

1. Plugins: Most strategies can be implemented as additional code that runs on top of the basic training and evaluation loops (e.g. the Naive strategy). Therefore, the easiest way to define a custom strategy such as a regularization or replay strategy, is to define it as a custom plugin. The advantage of plugins is that they can be combined, as long as they are compatible, i.e. they do not modify the same part of the state. The disadvantage is that in order to do so you need to understand the strategy loop, which can be a bit complex at first.

2. Subclassing: In Avalanche, continual learning strategies inherit from the appropriate template, which provides generic training and evaluation loops. The most high level template is the BaseTemplate, from which all the Avalanche's strategies inherit. Most template's methods can be safely overridden (with some caveats that we will see later).

Keep in mind that if you already have a working continual learning strategy that does not use Avalanche, you can use most Avalanche components such as benchmarks, evaluation, and models without using Avalanche's strategies!

Training and Evaluation Loops

As we already mentioned, Avalanche strategies inherit from the appropriate template (e.g. continual supervised learning strategies inherit from the SupervisedTemplate). These templates provide:

1. Basic Training and Evaluation loops which define a naive (finetuning) strategy.

2. Callback points, which are used to call the plugins at a specific moments during the loop's execution.

3. A set of variables representing the state of the loops (current model, data, mini-batch, predictions, ...) which allows plugins and child classes to easily manipulate the state of the training loop.

The training loop has the following structure:

The evaluation loop is similar:

Methods starting with before/after are the methods responsible for calling the plugins. Notice that before the start of each experience during training we have several phases:

• dataset adaptation: This is the phase where the training data can be modified by the strategy, for example by adding other samples from a separate buffer.

• dataloader initialization: Initialize the data loader. Many strategies (e.g. replay) use custom dataloaders to balance the data.

• model adaptation: Here, the dynamic models (see the models tutorial) are updated by calling their adaptation method.

• optimizer initialization: After the model has been updated, the optimizer should also be updated to ensure that the new parameters are optimized.

Strategy State

The strategy state is accessible via several attributes. Most of these can be modified by plugins and subclasses:

• self.clock: keeps track of several event counters.

• self.experience: the current experience.

• self.adapted_dataset: the data modified by the dataset adaptation phase.

• self.dataloader: the current dataloader.

• self.mbatch: the current mini-batch. For supervised classification problems, mini-batches have the form <x, y, t>, where x is the input, y is the target class, and t is the task label.

• self.mb_output: the current model's output.

• self.loss: the current loss.

• self.is_training: True if the strategy is in training mode.

How to Write a Plugin

Plugins provide a simple solution to define a new strategy by augmenting the behavior of another strategy (typically the Naive strategy). This approach reduces the overhead and code duplication, improving code readability and prototyping speed.

Creating a plugin is straightforward. As with strategies, you must create a class that inherits from the corresponding plugin template (BasePlugin, BaseSGDPlugin, SupervisedPlugin) and implements the callbacks that you need. The exact callback to use depend on the aim of your plugin. You can use the loop shown above to understand what callbacks you need to use. For example, we show below a simple replay plugin that uses after_training_exp to update the buffer after each training experience, and the before_training_exp to customize the dataloader. Notice that before_training_exp is executed after make_train_dataloader, which means that the Naive strategy already updated the dataloader. If we used another callback, such as before_train_dataset_adaptation, our dataloader would have been overwritten by the Naive strategy. Plugin methods always receive the strategy as an argument, so they can access and modify the strategy's state.

The animation below shows the execution and callbacks steps of a Naive strategy that is extended with the EWC plugin:

Check base plugin's documentation for a complete list of the available callbacks.

How to Write a Custom Strategy

You can always define a custom strategy by overriding the corresponding template methods. However, There is an important caveat to keep in mind. If you override a method, you must remember to call all the callback's handlers (the methods starting with before/after) at the appropriate points. For example, train calls before_training and after_training before and after the training loops, respectively. The easiest way to avoid mistakes is to start from the template's method that you want to override and modify it based on your own needs without removing the callbacks handling.

Notice that the EvaluationPlugin (see evaluation tutorial) uses the strategy callbacks.

As an example, the SupervisedTemplate, for continual supervised strategies, provides the global state of the loop in the strategy's attributes, which you can safely use when you override a method. For instance, the Cumulative strategy trains a model continually on the union of all the experiences encountered so far. To achieve this, the cumulative strategy overrides adapt_train_dataset and updates `self.adapted_dataset' by concatenating all the previous experiences with the current one.

Easy, isn't it? :-)

In general, we recommend to implement a Strategy via plugins, if possible. This approach is the easiest to use and requires minimal knowledge of the strategy templates. It also allows other people to re-use your plugin and facilitates interoperability among different strategies.

For example, replay strategies can be implemented as a custom strategy or as plugins. However, creating a plugin allows using the replay in conjunction with other strategies or plugins, making it possible to combine different approaches to build the ultimate continual learning algorithm!

This completes the "Training" chapter for the "From Zero to Hero" series. We hope you enjoyed it!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Welcome to the "benchmarks" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. In this part we will present the functionalities offered by the Benchmarks module.

🎯 Nomenclature

Avalanche Benchmarks provide the data that you will for training and evaluating your model. Benchmarks have the following structure:

• A Benchmark is a collection of streams. Most benchmarks have at least a train_stream and a test_stream;

• A Stream is a sequence of Experiences. It can be a list or a generator;

• An Experience contains all the information available at a certain time t;

• AvalancheDataset is a wrapper of PyTorch datasets. It provides functionalities used by the training module, such as concatenation, subsampling, and management of augmentations.

📚 The Benchmarks Module

The bechmarks module offers:

• Datasets: Pytorch datasets are wrapped in an AvalancheDataset to provide additional functionality.

• Classic Benchmarks: classic benchmarks used in CL litterature ready to be used with great flexibility.

• Benchmarks Generators: a set of functions you can use to create your own benchmark and streams starting from any kind of data and scenario, such as class-incremental or task-incremental streams.

But let's see how we can use this module in practice!

🖼️ Datasets

Let's start with the Datasets. When using Avalanche, your code will manipulate AvalancheDatasets. It is a wrapper compatible with pytorch and torchvision map-style datasets.

In this example we created a classification dataset. Avalanche expects an attribute targets for classification dataset, which is provided by MNIST and most classification datasets. Avalanche provides concatenation and subsampling, which also keep the dataset attributes consistent.

🏛️ Classic Benchmarks

Most benchmarks will provide two streams: the train_stream and test_stream. Often, these are two parallel streams of the same length, where each experience is sampled from the same distribution (e.g. same set of classes). Some benchmarks may have a single test experience with the whole test dataset.

Experiences provide all the information needed to update the model, such as the new batch of data, and they may be decorated with attributes that are helpful for training or logging purposes. Long streams can be generated on-the-fly to reduce memory requirements and avoiding long preprocessing time during the benchmark creation step.

We will use SplitMNIST, a popular CL benchmark which is the class-incremental version of MNIST.

🐣 Benchmarks Generators

The most basic way to create a benchmark is to use the benchmark_from_datasets method. It takes a list of datasets for each stream and returns a benchmark with the specified streams.

we can also split a validation stream from the training stream

Experience Attributes

The Continual Learning nomenclature is overloaded and quite confusing. Avalanche has its own nomenclature to provide consistent naming across the library. For example:

• Task-awareness: a model is task-aware if it requires task labels. Avalanche benchmarks can have task labels to support this use case;

• Online: online streams are streams with small experiences (e.g. 10 samples). They look exactly like their "large batches" counterpart, except for the fact that len(experience.dataset) is small;

• Boundary-awareness: a model is boundary-aware if it requires boundary labels. Boundary-free models are also called task-free in the literature (there is not accepted nomenclature for "boundary-aware" models). We don't use this nomenclature because task and boundaries are different concepts in Avalanche. Avalanche benchmarks can have boundary labels to support this use case. Even for boundary-free models, Avalanche benchmarks can provide boundary labels to support evaluation metrics that require them;

• Classification: classification is the most common CL setting. Avalanche adds class labels to experience to simplify the code of the user. Similarly, Avalanche datasets keep track of targets to support this use case.

Avalanche experiences can be decorated with different attributes depending on the specific setting. Classic benchmarks already provide the attributes you need. We will see some examples of attributes and generators in the remaining part of this tutorial.

One general aspects of experience attributes is that they may not always be available. Sometimes, a model can use task labels during training but not at evaluation time. Other times, the model should never use task lavels but you may still need them for evaluation purposes (to compute task-aware metrics). Avalanche experience have different modalities:

• training mode

• evaluation mode

• logging mode

Each modality can provide access or mask some of the experience attributes. This mechanism allows you to easily add private attributes to the experience for logging purposes while ensuring that the model will not cheat by using that information.

Classification

classification benchmarks follow the ClassesTimeline protocol and provide attributes about the classes in the stream.

Task Labels

task-aware benchmarks add task labels, following the TaskAware protocol.

Online

To define online streams we need two things:

• a mechanism to split a larger stream

• attribute that indicate the boundaries (if necessary)

This is how you do it in Avalanche:

This completes the "Benchmark" tutorial for the "From Zero to Hero" series. We hope you enjoyed it!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Welcome to the "Logging" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. In this part we will present the functionalities offered by the Avalanche logging module.

📑 The Logging Module

In the previous tutorial we have learned how to evaluate a continual learning algorithm in Avalanche, through different metrics that can be used off-the-shelf via the Evaluation Plugin or stand-alone. However, computing metrics and collecting results, may not be enough at times.

While running complex experiments with long waiting times, logging results over-time is fundamental to "babysit" your experiments in real-time, or even understand what went wrong in the aftermath.

This is why in Avalanche we decided to put a strong emphasis on logging and provide a number of loggers that can be used with any set of metrics!

Loggers

Avalanche at the moment supports four main Loggers:

• InteractiveLogger: This logger provides a nice progress bar and displays real-time metrics results in an interactive way (meant for stdout).

• TextLogger: This logger, mostly intended for file logging, is the plain text version of the InteractiveLogger. Keep in mind that it may be very verbose.

• TensorboardLogger: It logs all the metrics on in real-time. Perfect for real-time plotting.

• WandBLogger: It leverages tools to log metrics and results on a dashboard. It requires a W&B account.

In order to keep track of when each metric value has been logged, we leverage two global counters, one for the training phase, one for the evaluation phase. You can see the global counter value reported in the x axis of the logged plots.

Each global counter is an ever-increasing value which starts from 0 and it is increased by one each time a training/evaluation iteration is performed (i.e. after each training/evaluation minibatch). The global counters are updated automatically by the strategy.

How to use loggers

Create your Logger

If the available loggers are not sufficient to suit your needs, you can always implement a custom logger by specializing the behaviors of the StrategyLogger base class.

This completes the "Logging" tutorial for the "From Zero to Hero" series. We hope you enjoyed it!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab

Welcome to the "Evaluation" tutorial of the "From Zero to Hero" series. In this part we will present the functionalities offered by the evaluation module.

📈 The Evaluation Module

The evaluation module is quite straightforward: it offers all the basic functionalities to evaluate and keep track of a continual learning experiment.

This is mostly done through the Metrics: a set of classes which implement the main continual learning metrics computation like A_ccuracy_, F_orgetting_, M_emory Usage_, R_unning Times_, etc. At the moment, in Avalanche we offer a number of pre-implemented metrics you can use for your own experiments. We made sure to include all the major accuracy-based metrics but also the ones related to computation and memory.

Each metric comes with a standalone class and a set of plugin classes aimed at emitting metric values on specific moments during training and evaluation.

Standalone metric

As an example, the standalone Accuracy class can be used to monitor the average accuracy over a stream of <input,target> pairs. The class provides an update method to update the current average accuracy, a result method to print the current average accuracy and a reset method to set the current average accuracy to zero. The call to resultdoes not change the metric state.

The TaskAwareAccuracy metric keeps separate accuracy counters for different task labels. As such, it requires the task_labels parameter, which specifies which task is associated with the current patterns. The metric returns a dictionary mapping task labels to accuracy values.

Plugin metric

If you want to integrate the available metrics automatically in the training and evaluation flow, you can use plugin metrics, like EpochAccuracy which logs the accuracy after each training epoch, or ExperienceAccuracy which logs the accuracy after each evaluation experience. Each of these metrics emits a curve composed by its values at different points in time (e.g. on different training epochs). In order to simplify the use of these metrics, we provided utility functions with which you can create different plugin metrics in one shot. The results of these functions can be passed as parameters directly to the EvaluationPlugin(see below).

📐Evaluation Plugin

The Evaluation Plugin is the object in charge of configuring and controlling the evaluation procedure. This object can be passed to a Strategy as a "special" plugin through the evaluator attribute.

The Evaluation Plugin accepts as inputs the plugin metrics you want to track. In addition, you can add one or more loggers to print the metrics in different ways (on file, on standard output, on Tensorboard...).

It is also recommended to pass to the Evaluation Plugin the benchmark instance used in the experiment. This allows the plugin to check for consistency during metrics computation. For example, the Evaluation Plugin checks that the strategy.eval calls are performed on the same stream or sub-stream. Otherwise, same metric could refer to different portions of the stream. These checks can be configured to raise errors (stopping computation) or only warnings.

Implement your own metric

To implement a standalone metric, you have to subclass Metric class.

To implement a plugin metric you have to subclass PluginMetric class

Accessing metric values

If you want to access all the metrics computed during training and evaluation, you have to make sure that collect_all=True is set when creating the EvaluationPlugin (default option is True). This option maintains an updated version of all metric results in the plugin, which can be retrieved by calling evaluation_plugin.get_all_metrics(). You can call this methods whenever you need the metrics.

The result is a dictionary with full metric names as keys and a tuple of two lists as values. The first list stores all the x values recorded for that metric. Each x value represents the time step at which the corresponding metric value has been computed. The second list stores metric values associated to the corresponding x value.

Alternatively, the train and eval method of every strategy returns a dictionary storing, for each metric, the last value recorded for that metric. You can use these dictionaries to incrementally accumulate metrics.

This completes the "Evaluation" tutorial for the "From Zero to Hero" series. We hope you enjoyed it!

🤝 Run it on Google Colab