Lightly

Documentation

Lightly is a computer vision framework for self-supervised learning.

With Lightly you can train deep learning models using self-supervision. This means, that you don’t require any labels to train a model. Lightly has been built to help you understand and work with large unlabeled datasets. It is built on top of PyTorch and therefore fully compatible with other frameworks such as Fast.ai.

NEW Lightly now has integrated support for active learning in combination with the Lightly platform. Use the open-source framework to create embeddings of your unlabeled data and combine them with model predictions to select the most valueable samples for labeling. Check it out here: Tutorial 3: Active learning with kNN

Self-supervised Learning

The figure below shows an overview of the different used by the ligthly PIP package and a schema of how they interact. The expressions in bold are explained further below.

Lightly Overview

Overview of the different concepts used by the lightly PIP package and how they interact.

  • Dataset

    In lightly, datasets are accessed through the lightly.data.dataset.LightlyDataset. You can create a LightlyDataset from a folder of images, videos, or simply from a torchvision dataset. You can learn more about this here: Tutorial 1: Structure Your Input.

  • Collate Function

    The collate function is the place where lightly applies augmentations which are crucial for self-supervised learning. You can use our pre-defined augmentations or write your own ones. For more information, check out Advanced and lightly.data.collate.BaseCollateFunction. You can add your own augmentations very easily as we show in this tutorial:

  • Dataloader

    For the dataloader you can simply use the PyTorch dataloader. Be sure to pass it a LightlyDataset though!

  • Backbone Neural Network

    One of the cool things about self-supervised learning is that you can pre-train your neural networks without the need for annotated data. You can plugin whatever backbone you want! If you don’t know where to start, our tutorials show how you can get a backbone neural network from a lightly.models.resnet.ResNet.

  • Model

    The model combines your backbone neural network with a projection head and, if required, a momentum encoder to provide an easy-to-use interface to the most popular self-supervised learning frameworks. Learn more in our tutorials:

  • Loss

    The loss function plays a crucial role in self-supervised learning. Currently, lightly supports a contrastive and a similarity based loss function.

  • Optimizer

    With lightly, you can use any PyTorch optimizer to train your model.

  • Self-supervised Embedding

    The lightly.embedding.embedding.SelfSupervisedEmbedding connects the concepts from above in an easy-to-use PyTorch-Lightning module. After creating a SelfSupervisedEmbedding, it can be trained with a single line:

    # build a self-supervised embedding and train it
encoder = lightly.embedding.SelfSupervisedEmbedding(model, loss, optimizer, dataloader)
encoder.train(gpus=1, max_epochs=10)

    However, you can still write the training loop in plain PyTorch code. See Tutorial 4: Train SimSiam on Satellite Images for an example

Active Learning

The image representations learned through self-supervised learning cannot only be used for downstream task or nearest neighbor search. The similarity between representations also serves as an excellent proxy for mutual information between images. This fact can be exploited when doing active learning to get the most informative subset of images during training. Check out our section on Active learning for more information.

Note

To use active learning you need a lightly version of 1.1.0 or newer! You can check the version of the installed package using pip list and check for the installed version of lightly.

First Steps

Tutorials

Python API

On-Premise

Indices and tables