ERROR WHEN USING SET_TRANSFORM() 
Author: avacaondata
State: closed

Hi, I'm trying to use dataset.set_transform(encode) as @lhoestq told me in this issue: https://github.com/huggingface/datasets/issues/1825#issuecomment-774202797

However, when I try to use Trainer from transformers with such dataset, it throws an error:

```
TypeError: __init__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'transform'
[INFO|trainer.py:357] 2021-02-12 10:18:09,893 >> The following columns in the training set don't have a corresponding argument in `AlbertForMaskedLM.forward` and have been ignored: text.
Exception in device=TPU:0: __init__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'transform'
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/anaconda3/envs/torch-xla-1.7/lib/python3.6/site-packages/torch_xla/distributed/xla_multiprocessing.py", line 330, in _mp_start_fn
    _start_fn(index, pf_cfg, fn, args)
  File "/anaconda3/envs/torch-xla-1.7/lib/python3.6/site-packages/torch_xla/distributed/xla_multiprocessing.py", line 324, in _start_fn
    fn(gindex, *args)
  File "/home/alejandro_vaca/transformers/examples/language-modeling/run_mlm_wwm.py", line 368, in _mp_fn
    main()
  File "/home/alejandro_vaca/transformers/examples/language-modeling/run_mlm_wwm.py", line 332, in main
    data_collator=data_collator,
  File "/anaconda3/envs/torch-xla-1.7/lib/python3.6/site-packages/transformers/trainer.py", line 286, in __init__
    self._remove_unused_columns(self.train_dataset, description="training")
  File "/anaconda3/envs/torch-xla-1.7/lib/python3.6/site-packages/transformers/trainer.py", line 359, in _remove_unused_columns
    dataset.set_format(type=dataset.format["type"], columns=columns)
  File "/home/alejandro_vaca/datasets/src/datasets/fingerprint.py", line 312, in wrapper
    out = func(self, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/alejandro_vaca/datasets/src/datasets/arrow_dataset.py", line 818, in set_format
    _ = get_formatter(type, **format_kwargs)
  File "/home/alejandro_vaca/datasets/src/datasets/formatting/__init__.py", line 112, in get_formatter
    return _FORMAT_TYPES[format_type](**format_kwargs)
TypeError: __init__() missing 1 required positional argument: 'transform'
```

The code I'm using:

```{python}

    def tokenize_function(examples):
        # Remove empty lines
        examples["text"] = [line for line in examples["text"] if len(line) > 0 and not line.isspace()]
        return tokenizer(examples["text"], padding=padding, truncation=True, max_length=data_args.max_seq_length)

    datasets.set_transform(tokenize_function)

    data_collator = DataCollatorForWholeWordMask(tokenizer=tokenizer, mlm_probability=data_args.mlm_probability)

    # Initialize our Trainer
    trainer = Trainer(
        model=model,
        args=training_args,
        train_dataset=datasets["train"] if training_args.do_train else None,
        eval_dataset=datasets["val"] if training_args.do_eval else None,
        tokenizer=tokenizer,
        data_collator=data_collator,
    )
```

I've installed from source, master branch.


Comments: Hi @alejandrocros it looks like an incompatibility with the current Trainer @sgugger 
Indeed currently the Trainer of `transformers` doesn't support a dataset with a transform

It looks like it comes from this line: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/f51188cbe74195c14c5b3e2e8f10c2f435f9751a/src/transformers/trainer.py#L442

This line sets the format to not return certain unused columns. But this has two issues:
1. it forgets to also set the format_kwargs (this causes the error you got):
```python
dataset.set_format(type=dataset.format["type"], columns=columns, format_kwargs=dataset.format["format_kwargs"])
```
2. the Trainer wants to keep only the fields that are used as input for a model. However for a dataset with a transform, the output fields are often different from the columns fields. For example from a column "text" in the dataset, the strings can be transformed on-the-fly into "input_ids". If you want your dataset to only output certain fields and not other you must change your transform function.


FYI that option can be removed with `remove_unused_columns = False` in your `TrainingArguments`, so there is a workaround @alexvaca0 while the fix in `Trainer` is underway.

@lhoestq I think I will just use the line you suggested and if someone is using the columns that are removed in their transform they will need to change `remove_unused_columns` to `False`. We might switch the default of that argument in the next version if that proves too bug-proof.

I've tried your solutions @sgugger @lhoestq and the good news is that it throws no error. However, TPU training is taking forever, in 1 hour it has only trained 1 batch of 8192 elements, which doesn't make much sense... Is it possible that "on the fly" tokenization of batches is slowing down TPU training to that extent?

I'm pretty sure this is because of padding but @sgugger might know better

I don't know what the value of `padding` is in your lines of code pasted above so I can't say for sure. The first batch will be very slow on TPU since it compiles everything, so that's normal (1 hour is long but 8192 elements is also large). Then if your batches are not of the same lengths, it will recompile everything at each step instead of using the same graph, which will be very slow, so you should double check you are using padding to make everything the exact same shape. 

I have tried now on a GPU and it goes smooth! Amazing feature .set_transform() instead of .map()! Now I can pre-train my model without the hard disk limitation. Thanks for your work all HuggingFace team!! :clap: 

In the end, to make it work I turned to A-100 gpus instead of TPUS, among other changes. Set_transform doesn't work as expected and slows down training very much even in GPUs, and applying map destroys the disk, as it multiplies by 100 the size of the data passed to it (due to inefficient implementation converting strings to int64 floats I guess). For that reason, I chose to use datasets to load the data as text, and then edit the Collator from Transformers to tokenize every batch it receives before processing it. That way, I'm being able to train fast, without memory breaks, without the disk being unnecessarily filled, while making use of GPUs almost all the time I'm paying for them (the map function over the whole dataset took ~15hrs, in which you're not training at all). I hope this info helps others that are looking for training a language model from scratch cheaply, I'm going to close the issue as the optimal solution I found after many experiments to the problem posted in it is explained above. 

Great comment @alexvaca0 . I think that we could re-open the issue as a reformulation of why it takes so much space to save the arrow. Saving a 1% of oscar corpus takes more thank 600 GB (it breaks when it pass 600GB because it is the free memory that I have at this moment) when the full dataset is 1,3 TB. I have a 1TB M.2 NVMe disk that I can not train on because the saved .arrow files goes crazily big. If you can share your Collator I will be grateful.