Machine Learning with Python

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You can use Apache Beam with the RunInference API to use machine learning (ML) models to do local and remote inference with batch and streaming pipelines. Starting with Apache Beam 2.40.0, PyTorch and Scikit-learn frameworks are supported. Tensorflow models are supported through tfx-bsl.

You can create multiple types of transforms using the RunInference API: the API takes multiple types of setup parameters from model handlers, and the parameter type determines the model implementation.

For more infomation about machine learning with Apache Beam, see:

Why use the RunInference API?

RunInference takes advantage of existing Apache Beam concepts, such as the BatchElements transform and the Shared class, to enable you to use models in your pipelines to create transforms optimized for machine learning inferences. The ability to create arbitrarily complex workflow graphs also allows you to build multi-model pipelines.

BatchElements PTransform

To take advantage of the optimizations of vectorized inference that many models implement, we added the BatchElements transform as an intermediate step before making the prediction for the model. This transform batches elements together. The batched elements are then applied with a transformation for the particular framework of RunInference. For example, for numpy ndarrays, we call numpy.stack(), and for torch Tensor elements, we call torch.stack().

To customize the settings for beam.BatchElements, in ModelHandler, override the batch_elements_kwargs function. For example, use min_batch_size to set the lowest number of elements per batch or max_batch_size to set the highest number of elements per batch.

For more information, see the BatchElements transform documentation.

Shared helper class

Using the Shared class within the RunInference implementation makes it possible to load the model only once per process and share it with all DoFn instances created in that process. This feature reduces memory consumption and model loading time. For more information, see the Shared class documentation.

Multi-model pipelines

The RunInference API can be composed into multi-model pipelines. Multi-model pipelines can be useful for A/B testing or for building out cascade models made up of models that perform tokenization, sentence segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, named entity extraction, language detection, coreference resolution, and more. For more information about multi-model pipelines, see Multi-model pipelines.

Modify a Python pipeline to use an ML model

To use the RunInference transform, add the following code to your pipeline:

from apache_beam.ml.inference.base import RunInference
with pipeline as p:
   predictions = ( p |  'Read' >> beam.ReadFromSource('a_source')
                     | 'RunInference' >> RunInference(<model_handler>)

Where model_handler is the model handler setup code.

To import models, you need to configure a ModelHandler object that wraps the underlying model. Which ModelHandler you import depends on the framework and type of data structure that contains the inputs. The following examples show some ModelHandlers that you might want to import.

from apache_beam.ml.inference.sklearn_inference import SklearnModelHandlerNumpy
from apache_beam.ml.inference.sklearn_inference import SklearnModelHandlerPandas
from apache_beam.ml.inference.pytorch_inference import PytorchModelHandlerTensor
from apache_beam.ml.inference.pytorch_inference import PytorchModelHandlerKeyedTensor
from tfx_bsl.public.beam.run_inference import CreateModelHandler

Use pre-trained models

The section provides requirements for using pre-trained models with PyTorch and Scikit-learn

PyTorch

You need to provide a path to a file that contains the model’s saved weights. This path must be accessible by the pipeline. To use pre-trained models with the RunInference API and the PyTorch framework, complete the following steps:

  1. Download the pre-trained weights and host them in a location that the pipeline can access.
  2. Pass the path of the model weights to the PyTorch ModelHandler by using the following code: state_dict_path=<path_to_weights>.

See this notebook that illustrates running PyTorch models with Apache Beam.

Scikit-learn

You need to provide a path to a file that contains the pickled Scikit-learn model. This path must be accessible by the pipeline. To use pre-trained models with the RunInference API and the Scikit-learn framework, complete the following steps:

  1. Download the pickled model class and host it in a location that the pipeline can access.
  2. Pass the path of the model to the Sklearn ModelHandler by using the following code: model_uri=<path_to_pickled_file> and model_file_type: <ModelFileType>, where you can specify ModelFileType.PICKLE or ModelFileType.JOBLIB, depending on how the model was serialized.

See this notebook that illustrates running Scikit-learn models with Apache Beam.

TensorFlow

To use TensorFlow with the RunInference API, you have two options:

  1. Use the built-in TensorFlow Model Handlers in Apache Beam SDK - TFModelHandlerNumpy and TFModelHandlerTensor.
    • Depending on the type of input for your model, use TFModelHandlerNumpy for numpy input and TFModelHandlerTensor for tf.Tensor input respectively.
    • Use tensorflow 2.7 or later.
    • Pass the path of the model to the TensorFlow ModelHandler by using model_uri=<path_to_trained_model>.
    • Alternatively, you can pass the path to saved weights of the trained model, a function to build the model using create_model_fn=<function>, and set the model_type=ModelType.SAVED_WEIGHTS. See this notebook that illustrates running Tensorflow models with Built-in model handlers.
  2. Using tfx_bsl.
    • Use this approach if your model input is of type tf.Example.
    • Use tfx_bsl version 1.10.0 or later.
    • Create a model handler using tfx_bsl.public.beam.run_inference.CreateModelHandler().
    • Use the model handler with the apache_beam.ml.inference.base.RunInference transform. See this notebook that illustrates running TensorFlow models with Apache Beam and tfx-bsl.

Use custom models

If you would like to use a model that isn’t specified by one of the supported frameworks, the RunInference API is designed flexibly to allow you to use any custom machine learning models. You only need to create your own ModelHandler or KeyedModelHandler with logic to load your model and use it to run the inference.

A simple example can be found in this notebook. The load_model method shows how to load the model using a popular spaCy package while run_inference shows how to run the inference on a batch of examples.

Use multiple models

You can also use the RunInference transform to add multiple inference models to your Python pipeline.

A/B Pattern

with pipeline as p:
   data = p | 'Read' >> beam.ReadFromSource('a_source')
   model_a_predictions = data | RunInference(<model_handler_A>)
   model_b_predictions = data | RunInference(<model_handler_B>)

Where model_handler_A and model_handler_B are the model handler setup code.

Cascade Pattern

with pipeline as p:
   data = p | 'Read' >> beam.ReadFromSource('a_source')
   model_a_predictions = data | RunInference(<model_handler_A>)
   model_b_predictions = model_a_predictions | beam.Map(some_post_processing) | RunInference(<model_handler_B>)

Where model_handler_A and model_handler_B are the model handler setup code.

Use Resource Hints for Different Model Requirements

When using multiple models in a single pipeline, different models may have different memory or worker SKU requirements. Resource hints allow you to provide information to a runner about the compute resource requirements for each step in your pipeline.

For example, the following snippet extends the previous cascade pattern with hints for each RunInference call to specify RAM and hardware accelerator requirements:

with pipeline as p:
   data = p | 'Read' >> beam.ReadFromSource('a_source')
   model_a_predictions = data | RunInference(<model_handler_A>).with_resource_hints(min_ram="20GB")
   model_b_predictions = model_a_predictions
      | beam.Map(some_post_processing)
      | RunInference(<model_handler_B>).with_resource_hints(
         min_ram="4GB",
         accelerator="type:nvidia-tesla-k80;count:1;install-nvidia-driver")

For more information on resource hints, see Resource hints.

Use a keyed ModelHandler

If a key is attached to the examples, wrap the KeyedModelHandler around the ModelHandler object:

from apache_beam.ml.inference.base import KeyedModelHandler
keyed_model_handler = KeyedModelHandler(PytorchModelHandlerTensor(...))
with pipeline as p:
   data = p | beam.Create([
      ('img1', torch.tensor([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],...])),
      ('img2', torch.tensor([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],...])),
      ('img3', torch.tensor([[1,2,3],[4,5,6],...])),
   ])
   predictions = data | RunInference(keyed_model_handler)

If you are unsure if your data is keyed, you can also use MaybeKeyedModelHandler.

For more information, see KeyedModelHander.

Use the PredictionResult object

When doing a prediction in Apache Beam, the output PCollection includes both the keys of the input examples and the inferences. Including both these items in the output allows you to find the input that determined the predictions.

The PredictionResult is a NamedTuple object that contains both the input and the inferences, named example and inference, respectively. When keys are passed with the input data to the RunInference transform, the output PCollection returns a Tuple[str, PredictionResult], which is the key and the PredictionResult object. Your pipeline interacts with a PredictionResult object in steps after the RunInference transform.

class PostProcessor(beam.DoFn):
    def process(self, element: Tuple[str, PredictionResult]):
       key, prediction_result = element
       inputs = prediction_result.example
       predictions = prediction_result.inference

       # Post-processing logic
       result = ...

       yield (key, result)

with pipeline as p:
    output = (
        p | 'Read' >> beam.ReadFromSource('a_source')
                | 'PyTorchRunInference' >> RunInference(<keyed_model_handler>)
                | 'ProcessOutput' >> beam.ParDo(PostProcessor()))

If you need to use this object explicitly, include the following line in your pipeline to import the object:

from apache_beam.ml.inference.base import PredictionResult

For more information, see the PredictionResult documentation.

Run a machine learning pipeline

For detailed instructions explaining how to build and run a Python pipeline that uses ML models, see the Example RunInference API pipelines on GitHub.

Slowly-updating side input pattern to auto-update models used in RunInference

To perform automatic updates of the models used with the RunInference PTransform without stopping the Beam pipeline, pass a ModelMetadata side input PCollection to the RunInference input parameter model_metadata_pcoll.

ModelMetdata is a NamedTuple containing:

Use cases:

The side input PCollection must follow the AsSingleton view to avoid errors.

Note: If the main PCollection emits inputs and a side input has yet to receive inputs, the main PCollection is buffered until there is an update to the side input. This could happen with global windowed side inputs with data driven triggers, such as AfterCount and AfterProcessingTime. Until the side input is updated, emit the default or initial model ID that is used to pass the respective ModelHandler as a side input.

Beam Java SDK support

The RunInference API is available with the Beam Java SDK versions 2.41.0 and later through Apache Beam’s Multi-language Pipelines framework. For information about the Java wrapper transform, see RunInference.java. To try it out, see the Java Sklearn Mnist Classification example.

Troubleshooting

If you run into problems with your pipeline or job, this section lists issues that you might encounter and provides suggestions for how to fix them.

Unable to batch tensor elements

RunInference uses dynamic batching. However, the RunInference API cannot batch tensor elements of different sizes, so samples passed to the RunInferene transform must be the same dimension or length. If you provide images of different sizes or word embeddings of different lengths, the following error might occur:

File "/beam/sdks/python/apache_beam/ml/inference/pytorch_inference.py", line 232, in run_inference batched_tensors = torch.stack(key_to_tensor_list[key]) RuntimeError: stack expects each tensor to be equal size, but got [12] at entry 0 and [10] at entry 1 [while running 'PyTorchRunInference/ParDo(_RunInferenceDoFn)']

To avoid this issue, either use elements of the same size, or disable batching.

Option 1: Use elements of the same size

Use elements of the same size or resize the inputs. For computer vision applications, resize image inputs so that they have the same dimensions. For natural language processing (NLP) applications that have text of varying length, resize the text or word embeddings to make them the same length. When working with texts of varying length, resizing might not be possible. In this scenario, you could disable batching (see option 2).

Option 2: Disable batching

Disable batching by overriding the batch_elements_kwargs function in your ModelHandler and setting the maximum batch size (max_batch_size) to one: max_batch_size=1. For more information, see BatchElements PTransforms. For an example, see our language modeling example.

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