mmdeploy/docs/tutorials/how_to_evaluate_a_model.md

# How to evaluate a model

After we convert a PyTorch model to a backend model, we may need to evaluate the performance of the model before using it. In MMDeploy, we provide a tool to evaluate backend models in `tools/test.py`

## Prerequisite

Before evaluating a model of a specific backend, you should [install the plugins](../build.md) of the backend and convert the model to the backend with our [deploy tools](how_to_convert_model.md).

## Usage

```shell
python tools/test.py \
${DEPLOY_CFG} \
${MODEL_CFG} \
--model ${BACKEND_MODEL_FILES} \
[--out ${OUTPUT_PKL_FILE}] \
[--format-only] \
[--metrics ${METRICS}] \
[--show] \
[--show-dir ${OUTPUT_IMAGE_DIR}] \
[--show-score-thr ${SHOW_SCORE_THR}] \
--device ${DEVICE} \
[--cfg-options ${CFG_OPTIONS}] \
[--metric-options ${METRIC_OPTIONS}]
```

## Description of all arguments

* `deploy_cfg`: The config for deployment.
* `model_cfg`: The config of the model in OpenMMLab codebases.
* `--model`: The backend model file. For example, if we convert a model to TensorRT, we need to pass the model file with ".engine" suffix.
* `--out`:  The path to save output results in pickle format. (The results will be saved only if this argument is given)
* `--format-only`: Whether format the output results without evaluation or not. It is useful when you want to format the result to a specific format and submit it to the test server
* `--metrics`: The metrics to evaluate the model defined in OpenMMLab codebases. e.g. "segm", "proposal" for COCO in mmdet, "precision", "recall", "f1_score", "support" for single label dataset in mmcls.
* `--show`: Whether to show the evaluation result on the screen.
* `--show-dir`: The directory to save the evaluation result. (The results will be saved only if this argument is given)
* `--show-score-thr`: The threshold determining whether to show detection bounding boxes.
* `--device`: The device that the model runs on. Note that some backends restrict the device. For example, TensorRT must run on cuda.
* `--cfg-options`: Extra or overridden settings that will be merged into the current deploy config.
* `--metric-options`: Custom options for evaluation. The key-value pair in xxx=yyy
format will be kwargs for dataset.evaluate() function.

\* Other arguments in `tools/test.py` are used for speed test. They have no concern with evaluation.

## Example

```shell
python tools/test.py \
    configs/mmcls/classification_onnxruntime_static.py \
    {MMCLS_DIR}/configs/resnet/resnet50_b32x8_imagenet.py \
    --model model.onnx \
    --out out.pkl \
    --device cuda:0 \
```

## Note

* The performance of each model in [OpenMMLab](https://openmmlab.com/) codebases can be found in the document of each codebase.