x2vec, Towhee is all you need!

What is Towhee?

Towhee is an flexible, application-oriented framework for computing embedding vectors over unstructured data. It aims to make democratize anything2vec, allowing everyone - from beginner developers to large organizations - to train and deploy complex machine learning pipelines with just a few lines of code.

Towhee has pre-built pipelines for a variety of tasks, including audio/music embeddings, image embeddings, celebrity recognition, and more. For a full list of pipelines, feel free to visit our Towhee hub.

Key features

• Easy embedding for everyone: Transform your data into vectors with less than five lines of code.

• Rich operators and pipelines: No more reinventing the wheel! Collaborate and share pipelines with the open source community.

• Automatic versioning: Our versioning mechanism for pipelines and operators ensures that you never run into dependency hell.

• Support for fine-tuning models*: Feed your dataset into our Trainer and get a new model in just a few easy steps.

• Deploy to cloud*: Ready-made pipelines can be deployed to the cloud with minimal effort.

Features marked with a star (*) are on our roadmap and have not yet been implemented. Help is always appreciated, so come join our Slack or check out our docs for more information.

Getting started

Towhee requires Python 3.6+ and Pytorch 1.4.0+. Support for Tensorflow and scikit-learn models is coming soon. Towhee can be installed via pip:

% pip install -U pip  # if you run into installation issues, try updating pip
% pip install towhee

Towhee provides a variety of pre-built embedding pipelines. For example, generating an embedding can be done in as little as five lines of code:

>>> from towhee import pipeline

# Use our in-built embedding pipeline
>>> img_path = 'towhee_logo.png'
>>> embedding_pipeline = pipeline('image-embedding')
>>> embedding = embedding_pipeline(img_path)

Your image embedding is now stored in embedding. It's that simple.

Dive deeper

Custom machine learning pipelines can be defined in a YAML file or via a Spark-like high-level programming interface (coming soon ™). The first time you instantiate and use a pipeline, all Python functions, configuration files, and model weights are automatically downloaded from the Towhee hub. To ease the development process, pipelines which already exist in the local Towhee cache (/$HOME/.towhee/pipelines) will be automatically loaded:

# This will load the pipeline defined at $HOME/.towhee/pipelines/fzliu/my-embedding-pipeline.yaml
>>> embedding_pipeline = pipeline('fzliu/my-embedding-pipeline')

Architecture overview

Towhee is composed of three main building blocks - Pipelines, Operators, and a singleton Engine.

• Pipeline: A Pipeline is a single embedding generation task that is composed of several operators. Operators are connected together within the pipeline via a directed acyclic graph.

• Operator: An Operator is a single node within a pipeline. An operator can be a machine learning model, a complex algorithm, or a Python function. All files needed to run the operator are contained within a directory (e.g. code, configs, models, etc...).

• Engine: The Engine sits at Towhee's core. Given a Pipeline, the Engine will drive dataflow between individual operators, schedule tasks, and monitor compute resource (CPU/GPU/etc) usage. We provide a basic Engine within Towhee to run pipelines on a single-instance machine - K8s and other more complex Engine implementations are coming soon.

For a deeper dive into Towhee and its architecture, check out our documentation.

Design concepts

Towhee was created with a few key design concepts in mind. We differentiate ourselves from other machine learning frameworks by making machine learning accessible to a variety of users. To do this, we base Towhee's architecture and design around these key features.

• Application-oriented: Instead of being "just another model hub", we provide full end-to-end machine learning pipelines. Each pipeline can make use of any number of machine learning models or Python functions in a variety of configurations - ensembles, flows, or any combination thereof.

• Convenient: Towhee pipelines can be created to implement a variety of practical embedding tasks. We provide a number of pre-built pipelines on our hub.

• Extensible: Individual operators within each pipeline can be reconfigured and reused in different pipelines. Pipelines can be deployed anywhere you want - on your local machine, on a server with 4 GPUs, or even in the cloud.