# BigBirdPegasus

## Overview

The BigBird model was proposed in [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.14062) by

Zaheer, Manzil and Guruganesh, Guru and Dubey, Kumar Avinava and Ainslie, Joshua and Alberti, Chris and Ontanon,

Santiago and Pham, Philip and Ravula, Anirudh and Wang, Qifan and Yang, Li and others. BigBird, is a sparse-attention

based transformer which extends Transformer based models, such as BERT to much longer sequences. In addition to sparse

attention, BigBird also applies global attention as well as random attention to the input sequence. Theoretically, it

has been shown that applying sparse, global, and random attention approximates full attention, while being

computationally much more efficient for longer sequences. As a consequence of the capability to handle longer context,

BigBird has shown improved performance on various long document NLP tasks, such as question answering and

summarization, compared to BERT or RoBERTa.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

*Transformers-based models, such as BERT, have been one of the most successful deep learning models for NLP.

Unfortunately, one of their core limitations is the quadratic dependency (mainly in terms of memory) on the sequence

length due to their full attention mechanism. To remedy this, we propose, BigBird, a sparse attention mechanism that

reduces this quadratic dependency to linear. We show that BigBird is a universal approximator of sequence functions and

is Turing complete, thereby preserving these properties of the quadratic, full attention model. Along the way, our

theoretical analysis reveals some of the benefits of having O(1) global tokens (such as CLS), that attend to the entire

sequence as part of the sparse attention mechanism. The proposed sparse attention can handle sequences of length up to

8x of what was previously possible using similar hardware. As a consequence of the capability to handle longer context,

BigBird drastically improves performance on various NLP tasks such as question answering and summarization. We also

propose novel applications to genomics data.*

The original code can be found [here](https://github.com/google-research/bigbird).

## Usage tips

- For an in-detail explanation on how BigBird's attention works, see [this blog post](https://huggingface.co/blog/big-bird).

- BigBird comes with 2 implementations: **original_full** & **block_sparse**. For the sequence length < 1024, using

  **original_full** is advised as there is no benefit in using **block_sparse** attention.

- The code currently uses window size of 3 blocks and 2 global blocks.

- Sequence length must be divisible by block size.

- Current implementation supports only **ITC**.

- Current implementation doesn't support **num_random_blocks = 0**.

- BigBirdPegasus uses the [PegasusTokenizer](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/transformers/models/pegasus/tokenization_pegasus.py).

- BigBird is a model with absolute position embeddings so it's usually advised to pad the inputs on the right rather than

  the left.

## Resources

- [Text classification task guide](../tasks/sequence_classification)

- [Question answering task guide](../tasks/question_answering)

- [Causal language modeling task guide](../tasks/language_modeling)

- [Translation task guide](../tasks/translation)

- [Summarization task guide](../tasks/summarization)

## BigBirdPegasusConfig

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusConfig

    - all

## BigBirdPegasusModel

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusModel

    - forward

## BigBirdPegasusForConditionalGeneration

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusForConditionalGeneration

    - forward

## BigBirdPegasusForSequenceClassification

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusForSequenceClassification

    - forward

## BigBirdPegasusForQuestionAnswering

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusForQuestionAnswering

    - forward

## BigBirdPegasusForCausalLM

[[autodoc]] BigBirdPegasusForCausalLM

    - forward