Fairseq Import Error

[JefferyO]

Hi,

Thanks for your great work! I followed the README to run run_scripts/caption/evaluate_caption.sh and encountered the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "../../evaluate.py", line 13, in <module>
    from fairseq import distributed_utils, options, tasks, utils
  File "/usr/home/workspace/OFA/fairseq/fairseq/tasks/__init__.py", line 15, in <module>
    from .fairseq_task import FairseqTask, LegacyFairseqTask  # noqa
  File "/usr/home/workspace/OFA/fairseq/fairseq/tasks/fairseq_task.py", line 13, in <module>
    from fairseq import metrics, search, tokenizer, utils
ImportError: cannot import name 'metrics' from 'fairseq' (unknown location)

The Fairseq is installed with the one provided in your repo as required, however, when I changed to the official release (e.g. 0.12.2, which I understand is not appropriate as you have modified fairseq for OFA specifically, just for testing), the error disappeared.

So I'm wondering have you ever encountered any similar issue or if I stupidly missed anything when setting things up?

FYI, my git clone status:

git show HEAD
commit c8313b9e8e4cf4f4df693e96848d337ed74ab68d (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD)

Your answer will be very appreciated!

[JustinLin610]

I met this once, and it attributes to my installation. Maybe you should be make sure the old one is totally uninstalled before you install our version of Fairseq.

[JefferyO]

Thanks for the reply! I tried to uninstall everything and reinstall them, but the same error still emerged. However, when I tried to install a non-editable version of the repo-embedded fairseq, it worked error-free. Will stick to this solution atm, probably get back to this when necessary (e.g. want to make further modifications to the fairseq scripts)

[spetryk]

TL;DR: Changing the pip version to 21.2.4 might help.

I was having the same issue. I was especially confused, because I had been running OFA scripts within a conda env I created a month or so ago, and everything was working fine. Yet I recently created a new conda env, followed the OFA installation instructions again, and ran into the same error that JefferyO described.

After lots of uninstalling & reinstalling with various settings, I think the issue for me was the version of pip - at the moment, the latest pip version is 22.1.2, yet the version I used previously was 21.2.4. I changed the version, uninstalled fairseq & re-installed the requirements.txt, and now running evaluate_caption.sh works with the correct imports. I'm not sure why this worked; I didn't try to dig any further once it was working. I also didn't try the non-editable version.

Specifically, here are the steps I ran, within the OFA repo:

conda create --name ofa python=3.7.4    # I initially used python=3.9.12, but found that switching to 3.7.4 as recommended didn't matter for this error in particular
conda activate ofa
pip --version    # 22.1.2
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd run_scripts/caption
sh evaluate_caption.sh     # Errors out with fairseq metrics import error

python -m pip install pip==21.2.4
pip uninstall fairseq
cd ../../
pip install -r requirements.txt
cd run_scripts/caption
sh evaluate_caption.sh    # No longer any import errors

And my current git clone status:

git show HEAD
commit cd96d5c44b189b47c6fe8cff27068d7b1c9ae072 (HEAD -> main, origin/main, origin/HEAD)

Hope this helps!

[JefferyO]

Hey @spetryk , thanks so much for the suggestions! I think I was in the same condition as my pip version was also 22.1.2. And after downgrading to pip==21.2.4 and reinstalling everything following your steps, it works for me!