1014 learning rate finder

[rijobro]

Fixes #1014.

Description

Implements calculation of optimal learning rate based on https://github.com/davidtvs/pytorch-lr-finder.

Status

Ready

Types of changes

• Non-breaking change (fix or new feature that would not break existing functionality).
• New tests added to cover the changes.
• Integration tests passed locally by running ./runtests.sh --codeformat --coverage.
• Quick tests passed locally by running ./runtests.sh --quick.
• In-line docstrings updated.
• Documentation updated, tested make html command in the docs/ folder.

[rijobro]

@wyli @Nic-Ma @ericspod this part of the PR saves the state of the network and optimiser to disk or memory, such that they can be restored at the end.

Does this functionality live somewhere else in MONAI?

[ericspod]

We had that kind of functionality as part of an Ignite handler for saving checkpoints, but that's not quite how you're doing things here.

[wyli]

thanks @rijobro this is very useful!

Perhaps the way the training losses is computed/accumulated (self._train_batch) should be decoupled from the lr_finder. Intuitively I think the LR finder should work fine as long as the user provides a black box that takes lr/step as input, and returns a total_loss (e.g. self._train_batch and self._validate). Do you want to refactor this PR to decouple those? otherwise we could file a ticket and have another iteration.

pls see also some minor suggestions inline, they are mostly optional

@Can-Zhao would be great to have your comments as well!

[rijobro]

@wyli thanks, I'll get to it!

[rijobro]

@wyli this is ready if you want to review again, thanks!

[wyli]

thanks, it looks good, except some minor warnings on (object) https://deepsource.io/gh/Project-MONAI/MONAI/run/a53a8313-ab56-4aea-8a8b-e6fd4941f978/python/PYL-R0205 this new feature needs another iteration to decouple the actual training/validation logic_train_batch and _validate from the LearningRateFinder class

[andre-fs-ferreira]

I am having trouble using this class for GANs. Is there any way to do something similar to the "GANLearner" fastai?