Hide navigation sidebar
Hide table of contents sidebar
Back to top
Toggle table of contents sidebar

# Frequently Asked Questions

Looking for help? Submit bugs, ask questions, suggest content, and request features on our Github issues list.

## Model and Data Types

LIT can handle a variety of models with different input and output types, and works with any modern ML framework. For more information, see Framework & Model Support.

In addition to text, LIT has good support for different modalities, including images and tabular data. For examples, see:

- Image demo - image classification, using a Mobilenet model.

- Tabular demo - multi-class classification on tabular (numeric and categorical string) data, using the Palmer Penguins dataset.

For more details, see the features guide to input and output types.

## Languages

All strings in LIT are unicode and most components use model-provided tokenization if available, so in most cases non-English languages and non-Latin scripts should work without any modifications. For examples, see:

- XNLI demo - cross-lingual NLI, with up to 15 languages supported via a multilingual BERT model.

- T5 demo - includes WMT data for machine translation

## Scale

### Dataset Size

LIT can comfortably handle 10k-100k datapoints, depending on the speed of the server (for hosting the model) and your local machine (for viewing the UI). When working with large datasets, there are a couple caveats:

- LIT expects predictions to be available on the whole dataset when the UI loads. This can take a while if you have a lot of examples or a larger model like BERT. In this case, we recommend adding the flag `--warm_start=1` (or pass `warm_start=1` to the `Server` constructor in Python) to pre-compute predictions before starting the server.

- Datasets containing images may take a while to load. If full “native” resolution is not needed (such as if the model operates on a smaller size anyway, such as 256x256), then you can speed things up by resizing images in your `Dataset` loading code.

- LIT uses WebGL for the embedding projector (via ScatterGL) and for the Scalars and Dive modules (via Megaplot), which may be slow on older machines if you have more than a few thousand points.

If you have more data, you can use `Dataset.sample` or `Dataset.slice` to select a smaller number of examples to load. You can also pass individual examples to LIT through URL params, or load custom data files at runtime using the settings (⚙️) menu.

### Large Models

LIT can work with large or slow models, as long as you can wrap them into the model API. If you have more than a few preloaded datapoints, however, you’ll probably want to use `warm_start=1` (or pass `--warm_start=1` as a flag) to pre-compute predictions when the server loads, so you don’t have to wait when you first visit the UI.

Also, beware of memory usage: since LIT keeps the models in memory to support new queries, only so many models can fit on a single node or GPU. If you want to load more or larger models than can fit in local memory, you can host your model with your favorite serving framework and connect to it using a custom `Model` class.

We also have experimental support for using LIT as a lightweight model server; this can be useful, e.g., for comparing an experimental model running locally against a production model already running in an existing LIT demo. See `remote_model.py` for more details.

## Privacy and Security

LIT allows users to query the model, as well as to view the loaded evaluation data. The LIT UI state is ephemeral and exists only in the browser window; however, model predictions and any newly-generated examples (including as manually entered in the web UI) are stored in server memory, and if `--data_dir` is specified, may be cached to disk.

LIT has the ability to create or edit datapoints in the UI and then save them to disk. If you do not want the tool to be able to write edited datapoints to disk, then pass the `--demo_mode` runtime flag to the LIT server.

### I have proprietary data. Is LIT secure for my team to use?

We don’t store, collect or share datasets, models or any other information loaded into LIT. When you run a LIT server, anyone with access to the web address of the server will be able to see data from the loaded datasets and interact with the loaded models. If you need to restrict access to a LIT server, then make sure to configure the hosting of your LIT server to do so.

The default LIT development server does not implement any explicit access controls. However, this server is just a thin convenience wrapper, and the underlying WSGI App can be easily exported and used with additional middleware layers or external serving frameworks. See Running LIT in a Docker container for an example.

## Workflow and Integrations

### Sending examples from another tool

LIT can read input fields directly from the URL; they should be encoded as `data_<fieldname>=<value>`, and field names should match those in the (default) dataset.

There is also (experimental) support for sending more than one example, as long as the total URL length is within the browser’s size limit. Specify as above, but using `data0`, `data1`, `data2`, e.g. `data0_<fieldname>=<value>`.

### Downloading or exporting data

Currently, there are three ways to export data from the LIT UI:

- In the Data Table, you can copy or download the current view in CSV format - see the UI guide for more details.

- In the “Dataset” tab of the settings (⚙️) menu, you can enter a path to save data to. Data is pushed to the server and written by the server backend, so be sure the path is writable.

- If using LIT in a Colab or other notebook environment, you can access the current selection from another cell using `widget.ui_state.primary`, `widget.ui_state.selection`, and `widget.ui_state.pinned`.

### Loading data from the UI

There is limited support for this via the settings (⚙️) menu. Select a dataset, and enter a path to load from:

The supported format(s) depend on the dataset class; in most cases, the user should implement the `load()` method on their dataset class to handle the appropriate format.

### Using components outside the LIT UI

Python components such as models, datasets, and generators are designed to support standalone use. These don’t depend on the LIT serving framework, and you can treat them as any other Python class and use from Colab, regular scripts, bulk inference pipelines, etc. For an example, see the API documentation.

For the frontend, it’s a little more difficult. In order to respond to and interact with the shared UI state, there’s a lot more “framework” code involved (see the frontend development guide for more). We’re working on refactoring the LIT `modules` to separate framework and API code from the visualizations (e.g. `elements`), which can then be re-used in other environments.

### Training models with LIT

LIT is primarily an evaluation/inference-time tool, so we don’t provide any official training APIs. However, to facilitate code reuse you can easily add training methods to your model class. In fact, several of our demos do exactly this, using LIT’s `Dataset` objects to manage training data along with standard training APIs (such as Keras’ `model.fit()`). See `quickstart_sst_demo.py` and/or `glue_models.py` for examples.