14 KiB
DistilBERT
Overview
The DistilBERT model was proposed in the blog post Smaller, faster, cheaper, lighter: Introducing DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT, and the paper DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. DistilBERT is a small, fast, cheap and light Transformer model trained by distilling BERT base. It has 40% less parameters than google-bert/bert-base-uncased, runs 60% faster while preserving over 95% of BERT's performances as measured on the GLUE language understanding benchmark.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
As Transfer Learning from large-scale pre-trained models becomes more prevalent in Natural Language Processing (NLP), operating these large models in on-the-edge and/or under constrained computational training or inference budgets remains challenging. In this work, we propose a method to pre-train a smaller general-purpose language representation model, called DistilBERT, which can then be fine-tuned with good performances on a wide range of tasks like its larger counterparts. While most prior work investigated the use of distillation for building task-specific models, we leverage knowledge distillation during the pretraining phase and show that it is possible to reduce the size of a BERT model by 40%, while retaining 97% of its language understanding capabilities and being 60% faster. To leverage the inductive biases learned by larger models during pretraining, we introduce a triple loss combining language modeling, distillation and cosine-distance losses. Our smaller, faster and lighter model is cheaper to pre-train and we demonstrate its capabilities for on-device computations in a proof-of-concept experiment and a comparative on-device study.
This model was contributed by victorsanh. This model jax version was contributed by kamalkraj. The original code can be found here.
Usage tips
-
DistilBERT doesn't have
token_type_ids
, you don't need to indicate which token belongs to which segment. Just separate your segments with the separation tokentokenizer.sep_token
(or[SEP]
). -
DistilBERT doesn't have options to select the input positions (
position_ids
input). This could be added if necessary though, just let us know if you need this option. -
Same as BERT but smaller. Trained by distillation of the pretrained BERT model, meaning it’s been trained to predict the same probabilities as the larger model. The actual objective is a combination of:
- finding the same probabilities as the teacher model
- predicting the masked tokens correctly (but no next-sentence objective)
- a cosine similarity between the hidden states of the student and the teacher model
Resources
A list of official Hugging Face and community (indicated by 🌎) resources to help you get started with DistilBERT. If you're interested in submitting a resource to be included here, please feel free to open a Pull Request and we'll review it! The resource should ideally demonstrate something new instead of duplicating an existing resource.
- A blog post on Getting Started with Sentiment Analysis using Python with DistilBERT.
- A blog post on how to train DistilBERT with Blurr for sequence classification.
- A blog post on how to use Ray to tune DistilBERT hyperparameters.
- A blog post on how to train DistilBERT with Hugging Face and Amazon SageMaker.
- A notebook on how to finetune DistilBERT for multi-label classification. 🌎
- A notebook on how to finetune DistilBERT for multiclass classification with PyTorch. 🌎
- A notebook on how to finetune DistilBERT for text classification in TensorFlow. 🌎
- [
DistilBertForSequenceClassification
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
TFDistilBertForSequenceClassification
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
FlaxDistilBertForSequenceClassification
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - Text classification task guide
- [
DistilBertForTokenClassification
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
TFDistilBertForTokenClassification
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
FlaxDistilBertForTokenClassification
] is supported by this example script. - Token classification chapter of the 🤗 Hugging Face Course.
- Token classification task guide
- [
DistilBertForMaskedLM
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
TFDistilBertForMaskedLM
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
FlaxDistilBertForMaskedLM
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - Masked language modeling chapter of the 🤗 Hugging Face Course.
- Masked language modeling task guide
- [
DistilBertForQuestionAnswering
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
TFDistilBertForQuestionAnswering
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
FlaxDistilBertForQuestionAnswering
] is supported by this example script. - Question answering chapter of the 🤗 Hugging Face Course.
- Question answering task guide
Multiple choice
- [
DistilBertForMultipleChoice
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - [
TFDistilBertForMultipleChoice
] is supported by this example script and notebook. - Multiple choice task guide
⚗️ Optimization
- A blog post on how to quantize DistilBERT with 🤗 Optimum and Intel.
- A blog post on how Optimizing Transformers for GPUs with 🤗 Optimum.
- A blog post on Optimizing Transformers with Hugging Face Optimum.
⚡️ Inference
- A blog post on how to Accelerate BERT inference with Hugging Face Transformers and AWS Inferentia with DistilBERT.
- A blog post on Serverless Inference with Hugging Face's Transformers, DistilBERT and Amazon SageMaker.
🚀 Deploy
- A blog post on how to deploy DistilBERT on Google Cloud.
- A blog post on how to deploy DistilBERT with Amazon SageMaker.
- A blog post on how to Deploy BERT with Hugging Face Transformers, Amazon SageMaker and Terraform module.
Combining DistilBERT and Flash Attention 2
First, make sure to install the latest version of Flash Attention 2 to include the sliding window attention feature.
pip install -U flash-attn --no-build-isolation
Make also sure that you have a hardware that is compatible with Flash-Attention 2. Read more about it in the official documentation of flash-attn repository. Make also sure to load your model in half-precision (e.g. torch.float16
)
To load and run a model using Flash Attention 2, refer to the snippet below:
>>> import torch
>>> from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModel
>>> device = "cuda" # the device to load the model onto
>>> tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased')
>>> model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased", torch_dtype=torch.float16, attn_implementation="flash_attention_2")
>>> text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
>>> encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt').to(device)
>>> model.to(device)
>>> output = model(**encoded_input)
DistilBertConfig
autodoc DistilBertConfig
DistilBertTokenizer
autodoc DistilBertTokenizer
DistilBertTokenizerFast
autodoc DistilBertTokenizerFast
DistilBertModel
autodoc DistilBertModel - forward
DistilBertForMaskedLM
autodoc DistilBertForMaskedLM - forward
DistilBertForSequenceClassification
autodoc DistilBertForSequenceClassification - forward
DistilBertForMultipleChoice
autodoc DistilBertForMultipleChoice - forward
DistilBertForTokenClassification
autodoc DistilBertForTokenClassification - forward
DistilBertForQuestionAnswering
autodoc DistilBertForQuestionAnswering - forward
TFDistilBertModel
autodoc TFDistilBertModel - call
TFDistilBertForMaskedLM
autodoc TFDistilBertForMaskedLM - call
TFDistilBertForSequenceClassification
autodoc TFDistilBertForSequenceClassification - call
TFDistilBertForMultipleChoice
autodoc TFDistilBertForMultipleChoice - call
TFDistilBertForTokenClassification
autodoc TFDistilBertForTokenClassification - call
TFDistilBertForQuestionAnswering
autodoc TFDistilBertForQuestionAnswering - call
FlaxDistilBertModel
autodoc FlaxDistilBertModel - call
FlaxDistilBertForMaskedLM
autodoc FlaxDistilBertForMaskedLM - call
FlaxDistilBertForSequenceClassification
autodoc FlaxDistilBertForSequenceClassification - call
FlaxDistilBertForMultipleChoice
autodoc FlaxDistilBertForMultipleChoice - call
FlaxDistilBertForTokenClassification
autodoc FlaxDistilBertForTokenClassification - call
FlaxDistilBertForQuestionAnswering
autodoc FlaxDistilBertForQuestionAnswering - call