In my time using TVM to do various research projects, I found the thing I wanted most of all was a model zoo – pretrained models already pulled in to Relay/TVM. tvm.relay.testing.*
was a great starting place for me, but I’d love to see (1) pretrained weights included, (2) a greater variety of state-of-the-art models, and (3) perhaps some models which are imported from different frontends, to serve as importing examples.
I understand that this may contradict what I see as a key feature of TVM – that it should be easy to get models from any frontend into TVM, and so a model zoo should be theoretically unnecessary. In my limited experience, though, it was not necessarily straightforward to do this importing. For what it’s worth, I may not have given the importers a fair try – but in general I found the ones I used to be hard to use at best. If I cared about just one or two models (as some users of TVM might), then the cost to import the model would be worth it. In my use cases, though, I was trying to get as many models up and running as I could, and found that the overhead of importing was my main barrier.
I’m wondering if others have opinions on this idea. I’m no longer using TVM for research as directly, but I wanted, at the very least, to start the discussion on the idea of building a Relay model zoo.