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Visual Blocks: Visual Prototyping of AI Pipelines

Visual Blocks is a framework that allows any platform or application to easily integrate a visual and user-friendly interface for ML creation. Visual Blocks aims to help applications & platforms accelerate many stages of the ML product cycles including pipeline authoring, model evaluation, data pipelining, model & pipeline experimentation, and more. Visual Blocks enables these behaviors through a JavaScript front-end library for low/no code editing and a separate JS library embedding the newly created experience.

Visual Blocks Use Case of AR Sticker

If you use Visual Blocks in your research, please reference it as:

@inproceedings{Du2023Rapsai,
  title = {{Rapsai: Accelerating Machine Learning Prototyping of Multimedia Applications Through Visual Programming}},
  author = {Du, Ruofei and Li, Na and Jin, Jing and Carney, Michelle and Miles, Scott and Kleiner, Maria and Yuan, Xiuxiu and Zhang, Yinda and Kulkarni, Anuva and Liu, Xingyu and Sabie, Ahmed and Orts-Escolano, Sergio and Kar, Abhishek and Yu, Ping and Iyengar, Ram and Kowdle, Adarsh and Olwal, Alex},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {ACM},
  month = {Apr.},
  day = {22-29},
  numpages = {23},
  series = {CHI},
  doi = {10.1145/3544548.3581338},
}

@inproceedings{Du2023Experiencing,
  title = {{Experiencing Visual Blocks for ML: Visual Prototyping of AI Pipelines}},
  author = {Du, Ruofei and Li, Na and Jin, Jing and Carney, Michelle and Yuan, Xiuxiu and Wright, Kristen and Sherwood, Mark and Mayes, Jason and Chen, Lin and Jiang, Jun and Zhou, Jingtao and Zhou, Zhongyi and Yu, Ping and Kowdle, Adarsh and Iyengar, Ram and Olwal, Alex},
  booktitle = {Adjunct Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {ACM},
  series = {UIST},
}

Components

Node Graph Editor

The node graph editor is a custom Angular component. It takes a JSON object as the specifications of nodes (i.e., their inputs, outputs, properties, etc), and output the graph structure on changes (e.g., node added, edge deleted, etc).

Library of ML Nodes

ML Nodes include Models, I/O (camera, image, mic, etc.), and Visualizations.

Runtime

The runner takes a graph json file and a list of nodes. It traverses the graph to decide the execution order. For each node execution, it loads the Angular component and uses the run function to run it.

Visual Blocks in Google Colaboratory

There is a Visual Blocks Python package for use within Google Colaboratory notebooks. It allows you to register python functions defined in the notebook with Visual Blocks, and it provides an interactive UI where you can easily build ML pipelines to execute those functions along with other ML-related nodes.

For Users

Follow the steps below to get started in Colab with Visual Blocks. You can also check out the example notebooks in the directory examples/, or watch the tutorial.

For users who are interested in creating ML pipelines through the web interface, check out pipelines/ for a comrehensive gallery of end-to-end applications including 3D photos, manuscript helper with large language models, and cartoonization.

Step 1: Install Visual Blocks

!pip install visualblocks

Step 2: Write an inference function

The inference function should perform inference on the model of your chosen. It is your responsibility to import required packages that make the function work. For TF or TFLite models, you can find instructions on how to import and use them on TF Hub.

There are three types of inference functions supported by Visual Blocks:

  1. generic: Generic inference functions accept input tensors and return output tensors.
  2. text_to_text: Text to text inference functions accept strings and return output strings.
  3. text_to_tensors: Text to tensors inference functions accept strings and return output tensors.

When writing your inference function note the following:

  • Args: The type of input tensors should be a list of NumPy arrays.
  • Returns: The type of output tensors should be a list of NumPy arrays.
  • Ensure the dimensions of the input and output NumPy arrays align with the expected tensor dimensions of your model.

For references on how to define an inference function, check out the example notebooks in the directory examples/.

Step 2b (optional): Register inference functions dynamically

If you would like to view changes made to inference functions in the Visual Blocks UI without needing to re-run the Visual Blocks server, you can use a Visual Blocks decorator.

First, import the decorator:

from visualblocks import register_vb_fn

Then, decorate the inference function:

# inference_function_type could be `generic`, `text_to_text`, or `text_to_tensors`.
@register_vb_fn(type='[inference_function_type]')
def my_fn1(input_tensors):
  # ...

For example, to decorate a generic inference function:

@register_vb_fn(type='generic')
def my_generic_inference_function(tensors):
  # ...

Check out the Quick Start Style Transfer Example for reference.

Step 3: Import Visual Blocks and start server

If you do not use the function decorator register_vb_fn, pass each inference function with its inference type in the visualblocks.Server() function. For example:

# Pass each inference function in the Visual Blocks server
# when not using the decorator function

import visualblocks
server = visualblocks.Server(generic=my_fn1)

# You can also pass multiple functions:
# server = visualblocks.Server(generic=(my_fn1, my_fn2), text_to_text=(my_fn3))

When using the function decorator register_vb_fn, you do not need to pass inference functions in the Visual Blocks server. Example:

# Do not pass inference functions in the Visual Blocks server
# when using the decorator function

import visualblocks
server = visualblocks.Server()

Step 4: Display Visual Blocks UI

In a separate cell, call the display function to view the Visual Blocks graphical development environment in your Colab notebook.

server.display()

The registered functions can then be executed by using the corresponding type of node. For example, the registered generic inference functions can be selected in the "Colab (generic)" node, located in the "Model" category.

Step 5: Share the notebook

In Visual Blocks UI, you can click the Save to Colab button to save the pipeline to the notebook. You can then share the notebook with others and they will see the exact pipeline.

⚠️ When running a notebook with saved Visual Blocks pipeline, please do not "Run all". The cell with server.display() has to be run manually after all the other cells have finished running.

For Developers

!pip install git+https://... in a notebook will install the package straight from the latest, unreleased source in GitHub. The notebooks in the tests/ directory use this method.

The directory scripts/ contains turnkey scripts for common developer tasks such as building and uploading the Python distribution package.

Build and Upload Package to TestPyPI

One time setup:

# Install `build`.
$ python3 -m pip install --upgrade build

# Install `twine`, and make sure its binary is in your PATH.
$ python3 -m pip install twine

Steps:

  1. Update the version number in pyproject.toml.
  2. Run rm -rf build to clean up previous builds.
  3. Run scripts/package to build the package.
  4. Run scripts/upload to upload the package. You need to have the username and password ready.

Visual Blocks in Class

In collaboration with universities, we offer open materials for students to learn visual blocks in class and accept forking and contributions here:

Related Publications

@misc{Zhou2023InstructPipe,
  title = {{InstructPipe: Building Visual Programming Pipelines With Human Instructions}},
  author = {Zhou, Zhongyi and Jin, Jing and Phadnis, Vrushank and Yuan, Xiuxiu and Jiang, Jun and Qian, Xun and Zhou, Jingtao and Huang, Yiyi and Xu, Zheng and Zhang, Yinda and Wright, Kristen and Mayes, Jason and Sherwood, Mark and Lee, Johnny and Olwal, Alex and Kim, David and Iyengar, Ram and Li, Na and Du, Ruofei},
  year = {2023},
  publisher = {arXiv},
  numpages = {30},
  doi = {10.48550/arXiv.2312.09672},
}

@inproceedings{Zhou2024Experiencing,
  title = {{Experiencing InstructPipe: Building Multi-modal AI Pipelines Via Prompting LLMs and Visual Programming}},
  author = {Zhou, Zhongyi and Jin, Jing and Phadnis, Vrushank and Yuan, Xiuxiu and Jiang, Jun and Qian, Xun and Zhou, Jingtao and Huang, Yiyi and Xu, Zheng and Zhang, Yinda and Wright, Kristen and Mayes, Jason and Sherwood, Mark and Lee, Johnny and Olwal, Alex and Kim, David and Iyengar, Ram and Li, Na and Du, Ruofei},
  booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  year = {2024},
  numpages = {5},
  series = {CHI},
  doi = {10.1145/3613905.3648656},
}

Contributions

We are not accepting contributions to the core library at this time. The Visual Blocks team will contribute to this library.

However, we welcome community contributions of pipelines made with Visual Blocks. Please refer to pipelines/README.md to contribute your masterpiece!

Note

This is not an officially supported Google product. As this is an experimental release aimed at starting a conversation and gauging community interest, we want to explicitly communicate a lack of guarantee for long term maintenance.