My solution

59th place and bronze medal, 0.85633 GAP at private leaderborad. I used only video level features. Details in THSModel class in video_level_models.py

YouTube-8M Tensorflow Starter Code

This repo contains starter code for training and evaluating machine learning models over the YouTube-8M dataset. This is the starter code for our 2nd Youtube8M Video Understanding Challenge on Kaggle and part of the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018 selected workshop session. The code gives an end-to-end working example for reading the dataset, training a TensorFlow model, and evaluating the performance of the model. Out of the box, you can train several model architectures over either frame-level or video-level features. The code can easily be extended to train your own custom-defined models.

Table of Contents

• Running on Your Own Machine
  • Requirements
  • Training on Video-Level Features
  • Evaluation and Inference
  • Using Frame-Level Features
  • Using Audio Features
  • Using GPUs
  • Ground-Truth Label Files
• Running on Google's Cloud Machine Learning Platform
  • Requirements
  • Testing Locally
  • Training on the Cloud over Video-Level Features
  • Evaluation and Inference
  • Accessing Files on Google Cloud
  • Using Frame-Level Features
  • Using Audio Features
  • Using Larger Machine Types
• Overview of Models
  • Video-Level Models
  • Frame-Level Models
• Create Your Own Dataset Files
• Overview of Files
  • Training
  • Evaluation
  • Inference
  • Misc
• Training without this Starter Code
• About This Project

Running on Your Own Machine

Requirements

The starter code requires Tensorflow. If you haven't installed it yet, follow the instructions on tensorflow.org. This code has been tested with Tensorflow 1.8. Going forward, we will continue to target the latest released version of Tensorflow.

Please verify that you have Python 2.7+ and Tensorflow 1.8 or higher installed by running the following commands:

python --version
python -c 'import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.__version__)'

Downloading a fraction of the dataset

You can find complete instructions for downloading the dataset on the YouTube-8M website. We recommend you start with a small subset of the dataset, and download more as you need. For example, you can download 1/100th of the video-level and frame-level features as:

# Video-level
mkdir -p ~/yt8m/v2/video
cd ~/yt8m/v2/video
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/video/train mirror=us python
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/video/validate mirror=us python
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/video/test mirror=us python

# Frame-level
mkdir -p ~/yt8m/v2/frame
cd ~/yt8m/v2/frame
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/frame/train mirror=us python
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/frame/validate mirror=us python
curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | shard=1,100 partition=2/frame/test mirror=us python

Note: this readme will assume the directory ~/yt8m for storing the dataset, code, and trained models. However, you can use another directory path. Nonetheless, you might find it convenient to simlink that directory to ~/yt8m so that you can copy the commands from this page onto your terminal.

Try the starter code

Clone this git repo:

mkdir -p ~/yt8m/code
cd ~/yt8m/code
git clone https://github.com/google/youtube-8m.git

Training on Video-Level Features

python train.py --feature_names='mean_rgb,mean_audio' --feature_sizes='1024,128' --train_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/video/train*.tfrecord --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/video/sample_model --start_new_model

The --start_new_model flag will re-train from scratch. If you want to continue training from the train_dir, drop this flag. After training, you can evaluate the model on the validation split:

python eval.py --eval_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/video/validate*.tfrecord --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/video/sample_model

Note: Above binary runs "forever" (i.e. keeps watching for updated model checkpoint and re-runs evals). To run once, pass flag --run_once It should print lines like:

INFO:tensorflow:examples_processed: 298 | global_step 10 | Batch Hit@1: 0.513 | Batch PERR: 0.359 | Batch Loss: 2452.698 | Examples_per_sec: 2708.994

If you are competing on Kaggle, you should do inference outputing a CSV (e.g. naming file as kaggle_solution.csv):

python inference.py --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/video/sample_model  --output_file=kaggle_solution.csv --input_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/video/test*.tfrecord

Then, upload kaggle_solution.csv to Kaggle via Submit Predictions or via Kaggle API. In addition, if you would like to be considered for the prize, then your model checkpoint must be under 1 Gigabyte. We ask all competitors to upload their model files (only the graph and checkpoint, without code) as we want to verify that their model is small. You can bundle your model in a .tgz file by passing the --output_model_tgz flag. For example

python inference.py --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/video/sample_model  --output_file=kaggle_solution.csv --input_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/video/test*.tfrecord --output_model_tgz=my_model.tgz

then upload my_model.tgz to Kaggle via Team Model Upload.

Train Frame-level model

Train using train.py, selecting a frame-level model (e.g. FrameLevelLogisticModel), and instructing the trainer to use --frame_features. TLDR - frame-level features are compressed, and this flag uncompresses them.

python train.py --frame_features --model=FrameLevelLogisticModel --feature_names='rgb,audio' --feature_sizes='1024,128' --train_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/frame/train*.tfrecord --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/frame/sample_model --start_new_model

Evaluate the model

python eval.py --eval_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/frame/validate*.tfrecord --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/frame/sample_model

Produce CSV (kaggle_solution.csv) by doing inference:

python inference.py --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/frame/sample_model --output_file=kaggle_solution.csv --input_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/frame/test*.tfrecord

Similar to above, you can tar your model by appending flag --output_model_tgz=my_model.tgz.

Downloading the entire dataset

Now that you've downloaded a fraction and the code works, you are all set to download the entire dataset and come up with the next best video classification model!

To download the entire dataset, repeat the above download.py commands, dropping the shard variable. You can download the video-level training set with:

curl data.yt8m.org/download.py | partition=2/video/train mirror=us python

This will download all of the video-level training set from the US mirror, occupying 18GB of space. If you are located outside of North America, you should change the flag 'mirror' to 'eu' for Europe or 'asia' for Asia to speed up the transfer of the files.

Change 'train' to 'validate'/'test' and re-run the command to download the other splits of the dataset. Change 'video' to 'frame' to download the frame-level features. The complete frame-level features take about 1.53TB of space. You can set the environment variable 'shard' to 'm,n' to download only m/n-th of the data.

Tensorboard

You can use Tensorboard to compare your frame-level or video-level models, like:

MODELS_DIR=~/yt8m/v2/models
tensorboard --logdir frame:${MODELS_DIR}/frame,video:${MODELS_DIR}/video

We find it useful to keep the tensorboard instance always running, as we train and evaluate different models.

Training Details

The binaries train.py, evaluate.py, and inference.py use the flag --train_dir. The train.py outputs to --train_dir the TensorFlow graph as well as the model checkpoint, as the model is training. It will also output a JSON file, model_flags.json, which is used by evaluate.py and inference.py to setup the model and know what type of data to feed (frame-level VS video-level, as determined by the flags passed to train.py).

You can specify a model by using the --model flag. For example, you can utilize the LogisticModel (the default) by:

YT8M_DIR=~/yt8m/v2
python train.py --train_data_pattern=${YT8M_DIR}/v2/video/train*.tfrecord --model=LogisticModel --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/logistic

Since the dataset is sharded into 3844 individual files, we use a wildcard (*) to represent all of those files.

By default, the training code will frequently write checkpoint files (i.e. values of all trainable parameters, at the current training iteration). These will be written to the --train_dir. If you re-use a --train_dir, the trainer will first restore the latest checkpoint written in that directory. This only works if the architecture of the checkpoint matches the graph created by the training code. If you are in active development/debugging phase, consider adding --start_new_model flag to your run configuration.

Evaluation and Inference

To evaluate the model, run

python eval.py --eval_data_pattern=${YT8M_DIR}/v2/video/validate*.tfrecord --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/logistic --run_once=True

When you are happy with your model, you can generate a csv file of predictions from it by running

python inference.py --output_file predictions.csv --input_data_pattern=${YT8M_DIR}/v2/video/test*.tfrecord' --train_dir ~/yt8m/v2/models/logistic

This will output the top 20 predicted labels from the model for every example to predictions.csv.

Using Frame-Level Features

Follow the same instructions as above, appending --frame_features=True --model=FrameLevelLogisticModel --feature_names="rgb" --feature_sizes="1024" for train.py and changing --train_dir.

The FrameLevelLogisticModel is designed to provide equivalent results to a logistic model trained over the video-level features. Please look at the models.py file to see how to implement your own models.

Using Audio Features

The feature files (both Frame-Level and Video-Level) contain two sets of features: 1) visual and 2) audio. The code defaults to using the visual features only, but it is possible to use audio features instead of (or besides) visual features. To specify the (combination of) features to use you must set --feature_names and --feature_sizes flags. The visual and audio features are called 'rgb' and 'audio' and have 1024 and 128 dimensions, respectively. The two flags take a comma-separated list of values in string. For example, to use audio-visual Video-Level features the flags must be set as follows:

--feature_names="mean_rgb,mean_audio" --feature_sizes="1024,128"

Similarly, to use audio-visual Frame-Level features use:

--feature_names="rgb,audio" --feature_sizes="1024,128"

NOTE: Make sure the set of features and the order in which the appear in the lists provided to the two flags above match.

Using GPUs

If your Tensorflow installation has GPU support, this code will make use of all of your compatible GPUs. You can verify your installation by running

python -c 'import tensorflow as tf; tf.Session()'

This will print out something like the following for each of your compatible GPUs.

I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_init.cc:102] Found device 0 with properties:
name: Tesla M40
major: 5 minor: 2 memoryClockRate (GHz) 1.112
pciBusID 0000:04:00.0
Total memory: 11.25GiB
Free memory: 11.09GiB
...

If at least one GPU was found, the forward and backward passes will be computed with the GPUs, whereas the CPU will be used primarily for the input and output pipelines. If you have multiple GPUs, the current default behavior is to use only one of them.

Ground-Truth Label Files

We also provide CSV files containing the ground-truth label information of the 'train' and 'validation' partitions of the dataset. These files can be downloaded using 'gsutil' command:

gsutil cp gs://us.data.yt8m.org/2/ground_truth_labels/train_labels.csv /destination/folder/
gsutil cp gs://us.data.yt8m.org/2/ground_truth_labels/validate_labels.csv /destination/folder/

or directly using the following links:

• http://us.data.yt8m.org/2/ground_truth_labels/train_labels.csv
• http://us.data.yt8m.org/2/ground_truth_labels/validate_labels.csv

Each line in the files starts with the video id and is followed by the list of ground-truth labels corresponding to that video. For example, for a video with id 'VIDEO_ID' and two labels 'LABEL1' and 'LABEL2' we store the following line:

VIDEO_ID,LABEL1 LABEL2

Running on Google's Cloud Machine Learning Platform

Requirements

This option requires you to have an appropriately configured Google Cloud Platform account. To create and configure your account, please make sure you follow the instructions here.

Please also verify that you have Python 2.7+ and Tensorflow 1.0.0 or higher installed by running the following commands:

python --version
python -c 'import tensorflow as tf; print(tf.__version__)'

Testing Locally

All gcloud commands should be done from the directory immediately above the source code. You should be able to see the source code directory if you run 'ls'.

As you are developing your own models, you will want to test them quickly to flush out simple problems without having to submit them to the cloud. You can use the gcloud beta ml local set of commands for that.

Here is an example command line for video-level training:

gcloud ml-engine local train \
--package-path=youtube-8m --module-name=youtube-8m.train -- \
--train_data_pattern='gs://youtube8m-ml/2/video/train/train*.tfrecord' \
--train_dir=/tmp/yt8m_train --model=LogisticModel --start_new_model

You might want to download some training shards locally to speed things up and allow you to work offline. The command below will copy 10 out of the 4096 training data files to the current directory.

# Downloads 55MB of data.
gsutil cp gs://us.data.yt8m.org/2/video/train/traina[0-9].tfrecord .

Once you download the files, you can point the job to them using the 'train_data_pattern' argument (i.e. instead of pointing to the "gs://..." files, you point to the local files).

Once your model is working locally, you can scale up on the Cloud which is described below.

Training on the Cloud over Video-Level Features

The following commands will train a model on Google Cloud over video-level features.

BUCKET_NAME=gs://${USER}_yt8m_train_bucket
# (One Time) Create a storage bucket to store training logs and checkpoints.
gsutil mb -l us-east1 $BUCKET_NAME
# Submit the training job.
JOB_NAME=yt8m_train_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S); gcloud --verbosity=debug ml-engine jobs \
submit training $JOB_NAME \
--package-path=youtube-8m --module-name=youtube-8m.train \
--staging-bucket=$BUCKET_NAME --region=us-east1 \
--config=youtube-8m/cloudml-gpu.yaml \
-- --train_data_pattern='gs://youtube8m-ml-us-east1/2/video/train/train*.tfrecord' \
--model=LogisticModel \
--train_dir=$BUCKET_NAME/yt8m_train_video_level_logistic_model

In the 'gsutil' command above, the 'package-path' flag refers to the directory containing the 'train.py' script and more generally the python package which should be deployed to the cloud worker. The module-name refers to the specific python script which should be executed (in this case the train module).

It may take several minutes before the job starts running on Google Cloud. When it starts you will see outputs like the following:

training step 270| Hit@1: 0.68 PERR: 0.52 Loss: 638.453
training step 271| Hit@1: 0.66 PERR: 0.49 Loss: 635.537
training step 272| Hit@1: 0.70 PERR: 0.52 Loss: 637.564

At this point you can disconnect your console by pressing "ctrl-c". The model will continue to train indefinitely in the Cloud. Later, you can check on its progress or halt the job by visiting the Google Cloud ML Jobs console.

You can train many jobs at once and use tensorboard to compare their performance visually.

tensorboard --logdir=$BUCKET_NAME --port=8080

Once tensorboard is running, you can access it at the following url: http://localhost:8080. If you are using Google Cloud Shell, you can instead click the Web Preview button on the upper left corner of the Cloud Shell window and select "Preview on port 8080". This will bring up a new browser tab with the Tensorboard view.

Evaluation and Inference

Here's how to evaluate a model on the validation dataset:

JOB_TO_EVAL=yt8m_train_video_level_logistic_model
JOB_NAME=yt8m_eval_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S); gcloud --verbosity=debug ml-engine jobs \
submit training $JOB_NAME \
--package-path=youtube-8m --module-name=youtube-8m.eval \
--staging-bucket=$BUCKET_NAME --region=us-east1 \
--config=youtube-8m/cloudml-gpu.yaml \
-- --eval_data_pattern='gs://youtube8m-ml-us-east1/2/video/validate/validate*.tfrecord' \
--model=LogisticModel \
--train_dir=$BUCKET_NAME/${JOB_TO_EVAL} --run_once=True

And here's how to perform inference with a model on the test set:

JOB_TO_EVAL=yt8m_train_video_level_logistic_model
JOB_NAME=yt8m_inference_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S); gcloud --verbosity=debug ml-engine jobs \
submit training $JOB_NAME \
--package-path=youtube-8m --module-name=youtube-8m.inference \
--staging-bucket=$BUCKET_NAME --region=us-east1 \
--config=youtube-8m/cloudml-gpu.yaml \
-- --input_data_pattern='gs://youtube8m-ml/2/video/test/test*.tfrecord' \
--train_dir=$BUCKET_NAME/${JOB_TO_EVAL} \
--output_file=$BUCKET_NAME/${JOB_TO_EVAL}/predictions.csv

Note the confusing use of 'training' in the above gcloud commands. Despite the name, the 'training' argument really just offers a cloud hosted python/tensorflow service. From the point of view of the Cloud Platform, there is no distinction between our training and inference jobs. The Cloud ML platform also offers specialized functionality for prediction with Tensorflow models, but discussing that is beyond the scope of this readme.

Once these job starts executing you will see outputs similar to the following for the evaluation code:

examples_processed: 1024 | global_step 447044 | Batch Hit@1: 0.782 | Batch PERR: 0.637 | Batch Loss: 7.821 | Examples_per_sec: 834.658

and the following for the inference code:

num examples processed: 8192 elapsed seconds: 14.85

Accessing Files on Google Cloud

You can browse the storage buckets you created on Google Cloud, for example, to access the trained models, prediction CSV files, etc. by visiting the Google Cloud storage browser.

Alternatively, you can use the 'gsutil' command to download the files directly. For example, to download the output of the inference code from the previous section to your local machine, run:

gsutil cp $BUCKET_NAME/${JOB_TO_EVAL}/predictions.csv .

Using Frame-Level Features

Append

--frame_features=True --model=FrameLevelLogisticModel --feature_names="rgb" \
--feature_sizes="1024" --batch_size=128 \
--train_dir=$BUCKET_NAME/yt8m_train_frame_level_logistic_model

to the 'gcloud' training command given above, and change 'video' in paths to 'frame'. Here is a sample command to kick-off a frame-level job:

JOB_NAME=yt8m_train_$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S); gcloud --verbosity=debug ml-engine jobs \
submit training $JOB_NAME \
--package-path=youtube-8m --module-name=youtube-8m.train \
--staging-bucket=$BUCKET_NAME --region=us-east1 \
--config=youtube-8m/cloudml-gpu.yaml \
-- --train_data_pattern='gs://youtube8m-ml-us-east1/2/frame/train/train*.tfrecord' \
--frame_features=True --model=FrameLevelLogisticModel --feature_names="rgb" \
--feature_sizes="1024" --batch_size=128 \
--train_dir=$BUCKET_NAME/yt8m_train_frame_level_logistic_model

The 'FrameLevelLogisticModel' is designed to provide equivalent results to a logistic model trained over the video-level features. Please look at the 'video_level_models.py' or 'frame_level_models.py' files to see how to implement your own models.

Using Audio Features

The feature files (both Frame-Level and Video-Level) contain two sets of features: 1) visual and 2) audio. The code defaults to using the visual features only, but it is possible to use audio features instead of (or besides) visual features. To specify the (combination of) features to use you must set --feature_names and --feature_sizes flags. The visual and audio features are called 'rgb' and 'audio' and have 1024 and 128 dimensions, respectively. The two flags take a comma-separated list of values in string. For example, to use audio-visual Video-Level features the flags must be set as follows:

--feature_names="mean_rgb,mean_audio" --feature_sizes="1024,128"

Similarly, to use audio-visual Frame-Level features use:

--feature_names="rgb,audio" --feature_sizes="1024,128"

NOTE: Make sure the set of features and the order in which the appear in the lists provided to the two flags above match. Also, the order must match when running training, evaluation, or inference.

Using Larger Machine Types

Some complex frame-level models can take as long as a week to converge when using only one GPU. You can train these models more quickly by using more powerful machine types which have additional GPUs. To use a configuration with 4 GPUs, replace the argument to --config with youtube-8m/cloudml-4gpu.yaml. Be careful with this argument as it will also increase the rate you are charged by a factor of 4 as well.

Overview of Models

This sample code contains implementations of the models given in the YouTube-8M technical report.

Video-Level Models

• LogisticModel: Linear projection of the output features into the label space, followed by a sigmoid function to convert logit values to probabilities.
• MoeModel: A per-class softmax distribution over a configurable number of logistic classifiers. One of the classifiers in the mixture is not trained, and always predicts 0.

Frame-Level Models

• LstmModel: Processes the features for each frame using a multi-layered LSTM neural net. The final internal state of the LSTM is input to a video-level model for classification. Note that you will need to change the learning rate to 0.001 when using this model.
• DbofModel: Projects the features for each frame into a higher dimensional 'clustering' space, pools across frames in that space, and then uses a video-level model to classify the now aggregated features.
• FrameLevelLogisticModel: Equivalent to 'LogisticModel', but performs average-pooling on the fly over frame-level features rather than using pre-aggregated features.

Create Your Own Dataset Files

You can create your dataset files from your own videos. Our feature extractor code creates tfrecord files, identical to our dataset files. You can use our starter code to train on the tfrecord files output by the feature extractor. In addition, you can fine-tune your YouTube-8M models on your new dataset.

Overview of Files

Training

• train.py: The primary script for training models.
• losses.py: Contains definitions for loss functions.
• models.py: Contains the base class for defining a model.
• video_level_models.py: Contains definitions for models that take aggregated features as input.
• frame_level_models.py: Contains definitions for models that take frame- level features as input.
• model_util.py: Contains functions that are of general utility for implementing models.
• export_model.py: Provides a class to export a model during training for later use in batch prediction.
• readers.py: Contains definitions for the Video dataset and Frame dataset readers.

Evaluation

• eval.py: The primary script for evaluating models.
• eval_util.py: Provides a class that calculates all evaluation metrics.
• average_precision_calculator.py: Functions for calculating average precision.
• mean_average_precision_calculator.py: Functions for calculating mean average precision.

Inference

• inference.py: Generates an output CSV file containing predictions of the model over a set of videos. It optionally generates a tarred file of the model.

Misc

• README.md: This documentation.
• utils.py: Common functions.
• convert_prediction_from_json_to_csv.py: Converts the JSON output of batch prediction into a CSV file for submission.

Training without this Starter Code

You are welcome to use our dataset without using our starter code. However, if you'd like to compete on Kaggle, then you must make sure that you are able to produce a prediction CSV file, as well as a model .tgz file that match what gets produced by our inference.py. In particular, the predictions CSV file must have two fields: Id,Labels where Id is stored as id in the each test example and Labels is a space-delimited list of integer label IDs. The .tgz must contain these 4 files at minumum:

• model_flags.json: a JSON file with keys feature_sizes, frame_features, and feature_names. These must be set to values that would match what can be set in train.py. For example, if your model is a frame-level model and expects vision and audio features (in that order), then the contents of model_flags.json can be:

   {"feature_sizes":"1024,128", "frame_features":true, "feature_names":"rgb,audio"}
  

• files inference_model.data-00000-of-00001, inference_model.index, and inference_model.meta, which should be loadable as a TensorFlow MetaGraph.

To verify that you correctly generated the .tgz file, run it with inference.py:

python inference.py --input_model_tgz=/path/to/your.tgz --output_file=kaggle_solution.csv --input_data_pattern=${HOME}/yt8m/v2/video/test*.tfrecord

Make sure to replace video with frame, if your model is a frame-level model.

About This Project

This project is meant help people quickly get started working with the YouTube-8M dataset. This is not an official Google product.