How to check which Tensorflow version is compatible to Tensorflow Model Garden?

Question

In order to use a pre-trained model with Tensorflow, we clone the Model Garden for TensorFlow, then choose a model in Model Zoo, for example, Detection Model Zoo: EfficientDet D0 512x512.

Is there anyway to detect the right version of Tensorflow, e.g. 2.7.0, or 2.7.1, or 2.8.0, that will surely work with the aforementioned setup?

The documentation (README.md) doesn't seem to mention this requirement. Maybe it is implied somehow?

I checked setup.py for Object Detection, but there is still no clue!

\models\research\object_detection\packages\tf2\setup.py

REQUIRED_PACKAGES = [
    # Required for apache-beam with PY3
    'avro-python3',
    'apache-beam',
    'pillow',
    'lxml',
    'matplotlib',
    'Cython',
    'contextlib2',
    'tf-slim',
    'six',
    'pycocotools',
    'lvis',
    'scipy',
    'pandas',
    'tf-models-official>=2.5.1',
    'tensorflow_io',
    'keras'
]

Answer 1

I am not aware of a formal/quick way to determine the right Tensorflow version, given a specific Model Garden version, master branch. However, here is my workaround:

1. In the REQUIRED_PACKAGES above, we see tf-models-official>=2.5.1.
2. Checking the package history on pypi.org, the latest version, as of 03.02.2022, is 2.8.0.
3. So when installing this \models\research\object_detection\packages\tf2\setup.py file, pip will naturally fetch the latest version of tf-models-official, which is 2.8.0, thanks to >= symbol.
4. However, given tf-models-official, v2.8.0, its required packages are defined in tf-models-official-2.8.0\tf_models_official.egg-info\requires.txt (Note: download the package and extract it, using the link.)
5. Here, we find out:

tensorflow~=2.8.0

...meaning the required Tensorflow version is 2.8.*.

This may not be desired, e.g. in CoLab, currently, the version is 2.7.0.

6. To workaround, we should use tf-models-official, v2.7.0. Notice it matches the Tensorflow version. In this version 2.7.0's requires.txt, we should see tensorflow>=2.4.0, which is already satisfied by CoLab's default Tensorflow version (2.7.0).

7. To make this workaround possible, the \models\research\object_detection\packages\tf2\setup.py should be modified from, e.g. 'tf-models-official>=2.5.1' to 'tf-models-official==2.7.0'.

Caveat: I think this hack doesn't affect the functionality of the Object Detection API because it originally demands any tf-models-official >= 2.5.1. We just simply fix it to ==2.7.0 instead.