epoch-engine 0.1.5

A lightweight trainer and evaluator for PyTorch models with a focus on simplicity and flexibility.

🏋️‍♂️ EpochEngine: A Lightweight Training Framework for PyTorch

EpochEngine is a minimal yet flexible library for training and validating PyTorch models, currently focused on computer vision classification tasks. It provides a simple API to configure models, optimizers, schedulers, and metrics while handling logging, checkpointing, and plotting automatically.

The project is currently under active development, more changes expected.

🚀 Motivation behind the project

Training deep learning models often requires repeating the same boilerplate code: device management, checkpointing, resuming runs, logging results, and tracking metrics. Existing frameworks like PyTorch Lightning or Hugging Face Trainer are powerful, but they can feel heavy for smaller projects or quick experiments.

This library started as a lightweight training framework I could use in my own computer vision experiments.

It provides:

• Clean configurations with dataclasses
• Automatic run management (checkpoints, plots, JSON history, logs)
• Easy resume support for interrupted runs
• A simple but extendable interface for adding metrics and training options

The goal is not to replace bigger frameworks, but to make my own workflow faster, cleaner, and more reproducible — and to practice designing a training system from scratch.

✨ Key Features

• 🔧 Config-driven setup — pass model, loss, optimizer, scheduler, and metrics in simple configs.
• 💾 Automatic checkpointing — saves model weights, optimizer state and other important data after each epoch, with easy resuming via run ID.
• 📊 Metric tracking & plotting — logs training/validation metrics to JSON and generates plots at the end of training.
• 🚀 Resuming training — continue any previous run by providing its run ID.
• ⚡ Mixed precision training - supports AMP with torch.amp and GradScaler.
• 🧩 Extensible — easily add custom models, losses, optimizers, schedulers, and metrics.

Designed to be lightweight, transparent, and beginner-friendly, without the overhead of larger frameworks like PyTorch Lightning.

Installation

The package can be installed as follows:

# Installing the main package
pip install epoch-engine

# Installing additional optional dependencies
pip install epoch-engine[build,linters]

Development mode

# Cloning the repo and moving to the repo dir
git clone https://github.com/spolivin/epoch-engine.git
cd epoch-engine

# Installing the package and optional deps (dev mode)
pip install -e .
pip install -e .[build,linters]

Pre-commit support

The repository provides support for running pre-commit checks via hooks defined in .pre-commit-config.yaml. These can be loaded in the current git repository by running:

pre-commit install

pre-commit will already be loaded to the venv after running pip install epoch-engine[linters] or pip install -e .[linters]

Python API

Let's suppose that we have constructed a model in PyTorch called net (in the example below we can just take already built ResNet model) and set up the loss function we would like to optimize:

import torch.nn as nn

from epoch_engine.models import ResNet

# Instantiating a ResNet model for gray-scale images
net = ResNet(
    in_channels=1,
    num_blocks=[3, 3, 3],
    num_classes=10,
)
loss_func = nn.CrossEntropyLoss()

We have also the already prepared dataloaders: train_loader and valid_loader for training and validation sets respectively as well test_loader for testing the trained model on a separate set. Then, we can set up the Trainer in the following way.

Trainer set-up

Optimizer and scheduler

from epoch_engine.core import OptimizerConfig, SchedulerConfig

# Setting up configs for optimizer and scheduler
optimizer_config = OptimizerConfig(
    optimizer_class=torch.optim.SGD,
    optimizer_params={"lr": 0.25, "momentum": 0.75},
)
scheduler_config = SchedulerConfig(
    scheduler_class=torch.optim.lr_scheduler.StepLR,
    scheduler_params={"gamma": 0.1, "step_size": 2},
    scheduler_level="epoch",
)

Metrics

By default only loss is computed but we can also add extra metrics to track during Trainer run:

from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score, f1_score, precision_score

metrics = {
    "accuracy": accuracy_score,
    "precision": lambda y_true, y_pred: precision_score(y_true, y_pred, average="macro"),
    "f1": lambda y_true, y_pred: f1_score(y_true, y_pred, average="macro"),
}

Important thing here is for the passed dict to map metric name we want to see in the logs to the callable objects which in turn map targets and predictions to floats.

Advanced

One can also register metrics via a custom MetricConfig which is similar to passing a dictionary but with an additional plot parameter for controlling for which metrics to generate plots (in case of passing a dictionary, plot=True is by default):

from epoch_engine.core.configs import MetricConfig

trainer.register_metrics([
    MetricConfig(name="accuracy", fn=accuracy_score, plot=False),
])

In the example above we are registering an additional accuracy metric and specifically state that no plot need to be generated at the end of training run.

Trainer config

from epoch_engine.core.configs import TrainerConfig

trainer_config = TrainerConfig(
    model=net,
    criterion=loss_func,
    train_loader=train_loader,
    valid_loader=valid_loader,
    test_loader=test_loader,
    enable_amp=True,
    metrics=metrics,
)

trainer = Trainer.from_config(
    config=trainer_config,
    optimizer_config=optimizer_config,
    scheduler_config=scheduler_config,
)

Trainer will automatically detect whether CUDA, MPS or CPU is to be used.

Running the Trainer

New run

Now, we launch the training for the first time which will show the progress bar (if enabled):

# Launching training (with gradient clipping)
trainer.run(
    epochs=5,
    run_id=None,
    seed=42,
    enable_tqdm=True,
    clip_grad_norm=1.0,
)

Running the Trainer in this way will set up in the current directory the following directory structure:

current-dir/
├── runs/
    ├── run_id=82cc72/
    │    ├── checkpoints/
    │    |   ├── ckpt_epoch_1.pt
    │    |   ├── ckpt_epoch_2.pt
    │    |   ├── ckpt_epoch_3.pt
    │    |   ├── ckpt_epoch_4.pt
    │    |   └── ckpt_epoch_5.pt
    |    ├── plots/
    |        ├── accuracy.png
    |        ├── f1.png
    |        ├── loss.png
    |        └── precision.png
    |
    ├── metrics_history.json
    └── trainer_events.log

At the beginning of the run, a new run_id is generated (if run_id=None) and in the current folder the method creates runs folder with a separate folder for the files related to the current run (in the above example folder named run_id=82cc72 with the generated run ID). After each epoch the checkpoint (containing last trained epoch, Trainer's new run ID, model parameters and optimizer state) is saved to checkpoints subfolder.

At the end of the training, the plots for the registered metrics are saved as well (new in 0.1.3) in run-specific plots directory (new in 0.1.5).

Additionally, the losses for each data set as well as the registered metrics for each epoch and training run are saved to runs/metrics_history.json and are written to each run. Such results can look for instance like this:

{
     "runs": [
          {
               "run_id=82cc72": [
                    {
                         "loss/train": 0.7220337147848059,
                         "loss/valid": 0.056390782489593255,
                         "accuracy/train": 0.7354,
                         "accuracy/valid": 0.9828888888888889,
                         "precision/train": 0.745122229756801,
                         "precision/valid": 0.9828108100143986,
                         "f1/train": 0.7367284983928013,
                         "f1/valid": 0.982719354776437,
                         "epoch": 1
                    },
               ]
          }
     ]
}

To make the training results representation readable, the above output shows the training/validation results for only one epoch but in case of training for more epochs, there would be a longer list of such dictionaries distinguishable by epoch.

Resuming training

The training can be easily resumed by specifying the run_id from which we would like to continue training (resuming training only from the last logged epoch is supported):

trainer.run(
    epochs=2,
    run_id="82cc72",
    seed=42,
    enable_tqdm=True,
)

The new checkpoints will be saved to the same folder for this run and new metrics will be appended to the same run ID's data in runs/metrics_history.json. Additionally, the respective plots will also be updated.

Alternatively, if resuming training using the same Trainer instance, then we can just omit run_id whatsoever (equivalent to setting run_id=None), in which case Trainer will automatically infer that training for the last assigned run_id should be continued:

trainer.run(epochs=2)

Testing the trained model

After the model has been trained and validated using Trainer, we can quickly test it on test set either in this way:

test_metrics = trainer.evaluate()

or if test_loader was not set in TrainerConfig:

test_metrics = trainer.evaluate(loader=test_loader)

Test script

The basics of the developed API are presented in the run_trainer.py I built in the root of the repository. It can be run for instance as follows:

# Installing scikit-learn for using metrics
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Running the Trainer
python run_trainer.py --model=resnet --epochs=3 --enable-amp=True --plot-metrics=True

The training will be launched on the device automatically derived based on the CUDA availability and using mixed precision training (provided that the device is CUDA).

TODOs

• Add gradient clipping
• Add lightweight tests
• Re-structure TrainerConfig and move some arguments to other methods in order not to overload the config
• Change the structure of the generated runs directory to allow for more convenient structure
• Introduce an option to train using Automatic Mixed Precision (AMP)
• Add plots generation for registered metrics within the tracking/logging system
• Come up with a way to track metrics live during training/validation