Title: Multi-task dataset mixing
Author: ghomasHudson (CONTRIBUTOR)
State: open
Created: 2020-05-29T09:22:26Z
Labels: enhancement

generic discussion

It seems like many of the best performing models on the GLUE benchmark make some use of multitask learning (simultaneous training on multiple tasks).

The [T5 paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683.pdf) highlights multiple ways of mixing the tasks together during finetuning:
- **Examples-proportional mixing** - sample from tasks proportionally to their dataset size
- **Equal mixing** - sample uniformly from each task
- **Temperature-scaled mixing** - The generalized approach used by multilingual BERT which uses a temperature T, where the mixing rate of each task is raised to the power 1/T and renormalized. When T=1 this is equivalent to equal mixing, and becomes closer to equal mixing with increasing T.

Following this discussion https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/4340 in [transformers](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers), @enzoampil suggested that the `nlp` library might be a better place for this functionality.

Some method for combining datasets could be implemented ,e.g.
```
dataset = nlp.load_multitask(['squad','imdb','cnn_dm'], temperature=2.0, ...)
```

We would need a few additions:
- Method of identifying the tasks - how can we support adding a string to each task as an identifier: e.g. 'summarisation: '?
- Method of combining the metrics - a standard approach is to use the specific metric for each task and add them together for a combined score.

It would be great to support common use cases such as pretraining on the GLUE benchmark before fine-tuning on each GLUE task in turn. 

I'm willing to write bits/most of this I just need some guidance on the interface and other library details so I can integrate it properly.

Comments:
I like this feature! I think the first question we should decide on is how to convert all datasets into the same format. In T5, the authors decided to format every dataset into a text-to-text format. If the dataset had "multiple" inputs like MNLI, the inputs were concatenated. So in MNLI the input:

> - **Hypothesis**: The St. Louis Cardinals have always won.
> 
> - **Premise**: yeah well losing is i mean i’m i’m originally from Saint Louis and Saint Louis Cardinals when they were there were uh a mostly a losing team but 

was flattened to a single input:

> mnli hypothesis: The St. Louis Cardinals have always won. premise:
> yeah well losing is i mean i’m i’m originally from Saint Louis and Saint Louis Cardinals
> when they were there were uh a mostly a losing team but.

This flattening is actually a very simple operation in `nlp` already. You would just need to do the following:

```python 
def flatten_inputs(example):
    return {"input": "mnli hypothesis: " + example['hypothesis'] + " premise: " + example['premise']}

t5_ready_mnli_ds = mnli_ds.map(flatten_inputs, remove_columns=[<all columns except output>])
```

So I guess converting the datasets into the same format can be left to the user for now. 
Then the question is how we can merge the datasets. I would probably be in favor of a simple 

```python 
dataset.add()
```

function that checks if the dataset is of the same format and if yes merges the two datasets. Finally, how should the sampling be implemented? **Examples-proportional mixing** corresponds to just merging the datasets and shuffling. For the other two sampling approaches we would need some higher-level features, maybe even a `dataset.sample()` function for merged datasets. 

What are your thoughts on this @thomwolf @lhoestq  @ghomasHudson @enzoampil ?

I agree that we should leave the flattening of the dataset to the user for now. Especially because although the T5 framing seems obvious, there are slight variations on how the T5 authors do it in comparison to other approaches such as gpt-3 and decaNLP.

In terms of sampling, Examples-proportional mixing does seem the simplest to implement so would probably be a good starting point.

Temperature-scaled mixing would probably most useful, offering flexibility as it can simulate the other 2 methods by setting the temperature parameter. There is a [relevant part of the T5 repo](https://github.com/google-research/text-to-text-transfer-transformer/blob/03c94165a7d52e4f7230e5944a0541d8c5710788/t5/data/utils.py#L889-L1118) which should help with implementation.

According to the T5 authors, equal-mixing performs worst. Among the other two methods, tuning the K value (the artificial dataset size limit) has a large impact.


I agree with going with temperature-scaled mixing for its flexibility!

For the function that combines the datasets, I also find `dataset.add()` okay while also considering that users may want it to be easy to combine a list of say 10 data sources in one go.

`dataset.sample()` should also be good. By the looks of it, we're planning to have as main parameters: `temperature`, and `K`.

On converting the datasets to the same format, I agree that we can leave these to the users for now. But, I do imagine it'd be an awesome feature for the future to have this automatically handled, based on a chosen *approach* to formatting :smile: 

E.g. T5, GPT-3, decaNLP, original raw formatting, or a contributed way of formatting in text-to-text. 

This is an interesting discussion indeed and it would be nice to make multi-task easier.

Probably the best would be to have a new type of dataset especially designed for that in order to easily combine and sample from the multiple datasets.

This way we could probably handle the combination of datasets with differing schemas as well (unlike T5).

@thomwolf Are you suggesting making a wrapper class which can take existing datasets as arguments and do all the required sampling/combining, to present the same interface as a normal dataset?

That doesn't seem too complicated to implement.


I guess we're looking at the end user writing something like:
``` python
ds = nlp.load_dataset('multitask-t5',datasets=["squad","cnn_dm",...], k=1000, t=2.0)
```
Using the t5 method of combining here (or this could be a function passed in as an arg) 

Passing kwargs to each 'sub-dataset' might become tricky.

From thinking upon @thomwolf 's suggestion, I've started experimenting:
```python
class MultitaskDataset(DatasetBuilder):
    def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        super(MultitaskDataset, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs)
        self._datasets = kwargs.get("datasets")

    def _info(self):
        return nlp.DatasetInfo(
            description=_DESCRIPTION,
            features=nlp.Features({
                    "source": nlp.Value("string"),
                    "target": nlp.Sequence(nlp.Value("string"))
                })
        )

    def _get_common_splits(self):
        '''Finds the common splits present in all self._datasets'''
        min_set = None
        for dataset in self._datasets:
            if min_set != None:
                min_set.intersection(set(dataset.keys()))
            else:
                min_set = set(dataset.keys())
        return min_set

....

# Maybe this?:
squad = nlp.load_dataset("squad")
cnn_dm = nlp.load_dataset("cnn_dailymail","3.0.0")
multitask_dataset = nlp.load_dataset(
    'multitask_dataset',
    datasets=[squad,cnn_dailymail], 
    k=1000, 
    t=2.0
)

```

Does anyone know what methods of `MultitaskDataset` I would need to implement? Maybe `as_dataset` and `download_and_prepare`? Most of these should be just calling the methods of the sub-datasets. 

I'm assuming DatasetBuilder is better than the more specific `GeneratorBasedBuilder`, `BeamBasedBuilder`, etc....

One of the other problems is that the dataset size is unknown till you construct it (as you can pick the sub-datasets). Am hoping not to need to make changes to `nlp.load_dataset` just for this class.

I'd appreciate it if anyone more familiar with nlp's internal workings could tell me if I'm on the right track!

I think I would probably go for a `MultiDataset` wrapper around a list of `Dataset`.

I'm not sure we need to give it `k` and `t` parameters at creation, it can maybe be something along the lines of:
```python
squad = nlp.load_dataset("squad")
cnn_dm = nlp.load_dataset("cnn_dailymail","3.0.0")

multitask_dataset = nlp.MultiDataset(squad, cnn_dm)

batch = multitask_dataset.sample(10, temperature=2.0, k=1000)
```

The first proof-of-concept for multi-task datasets could definitely require that the provided datasets have the same name/type for columns (if needed you easily rename/cast a column prior to instantiating the `MultiDataset`).

It's good to think about it for some time though and don't overfit too much on the T5 examples (in particular for the ways/kwargs for sampling among datasets).

The problem with changing `k` and `t` per sampling is that you'd have to somehow remember which examples you'd already returned while re-weighting the remaining examples based on the new `k` and `t`values. It seems possible but complicated (I can't really see a reason why you'd want to change the weighting of datasets after you constructed the multidataset).

Wouldn't it be convenient if it implemented the dataset interface? Then if someone has code using a single nlp dataset, they can replace it with a multitask combination of more datasets without having to change other code. We would at least need to be able to pass it into a `DataLoader`.



A very janky (but working) implementation of  `multitask_dataset.sample()` could be something like this:
```python
import nlp
import torch

class MultiDataset():
    def __init__(self, *args, temperature=2.0, k=1000, maximum=None, scale=1):
        self.datasets = args
        self._dataloaders = {}
        for split in self._get_common_splits():
            split_datasets = [ds[split] for ds in self.datasets]
            mixing_rates = self._calc_mixing_rates(split_datasets,temperature, k, maximum, scale)
            weights = []
            for i in range(len(self.datasets)):
                weights += [mixing_rates[i]]*len(self.datasets[i][split])
            self._dataloaders[split] = torch.utils.data.DataLoader(torch.utils.data.ConcatDataset(split_datasets),
                                                        sampler=torch.utils.data.sampler.WeightedRandomSampler(
                                                            num_samples=len(weights),
                                                            weights = weights,
                                                            replacement=True),
                                                        shuffle=False)

    def _get_common_splits(self):
        '''Finds the common splits present in all self.datasets'''
        min_set = None
        for dataset in self.datasets:
            if min_set != None:
                min_set.intersection(set(dataset.keys()))
            else:
                min_set = set(dataset.keys())
        return min_set


    def _calc_mixing_rates(self,datasets, temperature=2.0, k=1000, maximum=None, scale=1):
       '''Work out the weighting of each dataset based on t and k'''
        mixing_rates = []
        for dataset in datasets:
            rate = len(dataset)
            rate *= scale
            if maximum:
                rate = min(rate, maximum)
            if temperature != 1.0:
                rate = rate ** (1.0/temperature)
            mixing_rates.append(rate)
        return mixing_rates

    def sample(self,n,split):
        batch = []
        for example in self._dataloaders[split]:
            batch.append(example)
            n -= 1
            if n == 0:
                return batch


def flatten(dataset,flatten_fn):
    for k in dataset.keys():
        if isinstance(dataset[k],nlp.Dataset):
            dataset[k] = dataset[k].map(flatten_fn,remove_columns=dataset[k].column_names)

# Squad
def flatten_squad(example):
    return {"source": "squad context: " + example['context'] + " question: " + example['question'],"target":example["answers"]["text"]}
squad = nlp.load_dataset("squad")
flatten(squad,flatten_squad)

# CNN_DM
def flatten_cnn_dm(example):
    return {"source": "cnn_dm: " + example['article'],"target":[example["highlights"]]}
cnn_dm = nlp.load_dataset("cnn_dailymail", "3.0.0")
flatten(cnn_dm,flatten_cnn_dm)

multitask_dataset = MultiDataset(squad, cnn_dm)
batch = multitask_dataset.sample(100,"train")
```

There's definitely a more sensible way than embedding `DataLoader`s inside. 

There is an interesting related investigation by @zphang here https://colab.research.google.com/github/zphang/zphang.github.io/blob/master/files/notebooks/Multi_task_Training_with_Transformers_NLP.ipynb

Good spot! Here are my thoughts:

- Aside: Adding `MultitaskModel` to transformers might be a thing to raise - even though having task-specific heads has become unfashionable in recent times in favour of text-to-text type models.
- Adding the task name as an extra field also seems useful for these kind of models which have task-specific heads
- There is some validation of our approach that the user should be expected to `map` datasets into a common form.
- The size-proportional sampling (also called "Examples-proportional mixing") used here doesn't perform too badly in the T5 paper (it's comparable to temperature-scaled mixing in many cases but less flexible. This is only reasonable with a `K` maximum size parameter to prevent very large datasets dominating). This might be good for a first prototype using:
    ```python
    def __iter__(self):
        """
        For each batch, sample a task, and yield a batch from the respective
        task Dataloader.

        We use size-proportional sampling, but you could easily modify this
        to sample from some-other distribution.
        """
        task_choice_list = []
        for i, task_name in enumerate(self.task_name_list):
            task_choice_list += [i] * self.num_batches_dict[task_name]
        task_choice_list = np.array(task_choice_list)
        np.random.shuffle(task_choice_list)

        dataloader_iter_dict = {
            task_name: iter(dataloader) 
            for task_name, dataloader in self.dataloader_dict.items()
        }
        for task_choice in task_choice_list:
            task_name = self.task_name_list[task_choice]
            yield next(dataloader_iter_dict[task_name])    
    ```
    We'd just need to pull samples from the raw datasets and not from `DataLoader`s for each task. We can assume the user has done `dataset.shuffle()` if they want to.

    Other sampling methods can later be implemented by changing how the `task_choice_list` is generated. This should allow more flexibility and not tie us to specific methods for sampling among datasets.


Another thought: Multitasking over benchmarks (represented as Meta-datasets in nlp) is probably a common use case. Would be nice to pass an entire benchmark to our `MultiDataset` wrapper rather than having to pass individual components.

Here's a fully working implementation based on the `__iter__` function of @zphang.

- I've generated the task choice list in the constructor as it allows us to index into the MultiDataset just like a normal dataset. I'm changing `task_choice_list` into a list of `(dataset_idx, example_idx)` so each entry references a unique dataset example. The shuffling has to be done before this as we don't want to shuffle within each task (we assume this is done by the user if this is what they intend).
-  I'm slightly concerned this list could become very large if many large datasets were used. Can't see a way round it at the moment though.
- I've used `task.info.builder_name` as the dataset name. Not sure if this is correct.
- I'd love to add some of the other `Dataset` methods (map, slicing by column, etc...). Would be great to implement the whole interface so a single dataset can be simply replaced by this.
- This does everything on the individual example-level. If some application required batches all from a single task in turn we can't really do that.

```python
import nlp
import numpy as np

class MultiDataset:
    def __init__(self,tasks):
        self.tasks = tasks

        # Create random order of tasks
        # Using size-proportional sampling
        task_choice_list = []
        for i, task in enumerate(self.tasks):
            task_choice_list += [i] * len(task)
        task_choice_list = np.array(task_choice_list)
        np.random.shuffle(task_choice_list)

        # Add index into each dataset
        # - We don't want to shuffle within each task
        counters = {}
        self.task_choice_list = []
        for i in range(len(task_choice_list)):
            idx = counters.get(task_choice_list[i],0)
            self.task_choice_list.append((task_choice_list[i],idx))
            counters[task_choice_list[i]] = idx + 1


    def __len__(self):
        return np.sum([len(t) for t in self.tasks])

    def __repr__(self):
        task_str = ", ".join([str(t) for t in self.tasks])
        return f"MultiDataset(tasks: {task_str})"

    def __getitem__(self,key):
        if isinstance(key, int):
            task_idx, example_idx = self.task_choice_list[key]
            task = self.tasks[task_idx]
            example = task[example_idx]
            example["task_name"] = task.info.builder_name
            return example
        elif isinstance(key, slice):
            raise NotImplementedError()

    def __iter__(self):
        for i in range(len(self)):
            yield self[i]


def load_multitask(*datasets):
    '''Create multitask datasets per split'''

    def _get_common_splits(datasets):
        '''Finds the common splits present in all self.datasets'''
        min_set = None
        for dataset in datasets:
            if min_set != None:
                min_set.intersection(set(dataset.keys()))
            else:
                min_set = set(dataset.keys())
        return min_set

    common_splits = _get_common_splits(datasets)
    out = {}
    for split in common_splits:
        out[split] = MultiDataset([d[split] for d in datasets])
    return out


##########################################
# Dataset Flattening

def flatten(dataset,flatten_fn):
    for k in dataset.keys():
        if isinstance(dataset[k],nlp.Dataset):
            dataset[k] = dataset[k].map(flatten_fn,remove_columns=dataset[k].column_names)

# Squad
def flatten_squad(example):
    return {"source": "squad context: " + example['context'] + " question: " + example['question'],
          "target":example["answers"]["text"]}
squad = nlp.load_dataset("squad")
flatten(squad,flatten_squad)

# CNN_DM
def flatten_cnn_dm(example):
    return {"source": "cnn_dm: " + example['article'],"target":[example["highlights"]]}
cnn_dm = nlp.load_dataset("cnn_dailymail", "3.0.0")
flatten(cnn_dm,flatten_cnn_dm)

#############################################

mtds = load_multitask(squad,cnn_dm)

for example in mtds["train"]:
    print(example["task_name"],example["target"])
```
Let me know if you have any thoughts. I've started using this in some of my projects and it seems to work. If people are happy with the general approach for a first version, I can make a pull request.

Hey! Happy to jump into the discussion here. I'm still getting familiar with bits of this code, but the reasons I sampled over data loaders rather than datasets is 1) ensuring that each sampled batch corresponds to only 1 task (in case of different inputs formats/downstream models) and 2) potentially having different batch sizes per task (e.g. some tasks have very long/short inputs). How are you currently dealing with these in your PR?

The short answer is - I'm not! Everything is currently on a per-example basis. It would be fairly simple to add a `batch_size` argument which would ensure that every `batch_size` examples come from the same task. That should suit most use-cases (unless you wanted to ensure batches all came from the same task and apply something like `SortishSampler` on each task first)

Your notebook was really inspiring by the way - thanks!

@zphang is having different batch sizes per task actually helpful? Would be interesting to know as it's not something I've come across as a technique used by any MTL papers.

mt-dnn's [batcher.py](https://github.com/namisan/mt-dnn/blob/master/mt_dnn/batcher.py) might be worth looking at.

> @zphang is having different batch sizes per task actually helpful? Would be interesting to know as it's not something I've come across as a technique used by any MTL papers.

I think having different batch sizes per task is particularly helpful in some scenarios where each task has different amount of data. For example, the problem I'm currently facing is one task has tens of thousands of samples while one task has a couple hundreds. I think in this case different batch size could help. But if using the same batch size is a lot simpler to implement, I guess it makes sense to go with that.

I think that instead of proportional to size sampling you should specify weights or probabilities for drawing a batch from each dataset. We should also ensure that the smaller datasets are repeated so that the encoder layer doesn't overtrain on the largest dataset.

Are there any references for people doing different batch sizes per task in the literature? I've only seen constant batch sizes with differing numbers of batches for each task which seems sufficient to prevent the impact of large datasets (Read 3.5.3 of the [T5 paper](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.10683.pdf) for example).



Hi,
regarding building T5 dataset , I think we can use datasets https://github.com/huggingface/datasets and then need something similar to tf.data.experimental.sample_from_datasets, do you know if similar functionality exist in pytorch? Which can sample multiple datasets with the given rates. thanks. 

Is this feature part of a `datasets` release yet? 

> Here's a fully working implementation based on the `__iter__` function of @zphang.
> 
> * I've generated the task choice list in the constructor as it allows us to index into the MultiDataset just like a normal dataset. I'm changing `task_choice_list` into a list of `(dataset_idx, example_idx)` so each entry references a unique dataset example. The shuffling has to be done before this as we don't want to shuffle within each task (we assume this is done by the user if this is what they intend).
> * I'm slightly concerned this list could become very large if many large datasets were used. Can't see a way round it at the moment though.
> * I've used `task.info.builder_name` as the dataset name. Not sure if this is correct.
> * I'd love to add some of the other `Dataset` methods (map, slicing by column, etc...). Would be great to implement the whole interface so a single dataset can be simply replaced by this.
> * This does everything on the individual example-level. If some application required batches all from a single task in turn we can't really do that.
> 
> ```python
> import nlp
> import numpy as np
> 
> class MultiDataset:
>     def __init__(self,tasks):
>         self.tasks = tasks
> 
>         # Create random order of tasks
>         # Using size-proportional sampling
>         task_choice_list = []
>         for i, task in enumerate(self.tasks):
>             task_choice_list += [i] * len(task)
>         task_choice_list = np.array(task_choice_list)
>         np.random.shuffle(task_choice_list)
> 
>         # Add index into each dataset
>         # - We don't want to shuffle within each task
>         counters = {}
>         self.task_choice_list = []
>         for i in range(len(task_choice_list)):
>             idx = counters.get(task_choice_list[i],0)
>             self.task_choice_list.append((task_choice_list[i],idx))
>             counters[task_choice_list[i]] = idx + 1
> 
> 
>     def __len__(self):
>         return np.sum([len(t) for t in self.tasks])
> 
>     def __repr__(self):
>         task_str = ", ".join([str(t) for t in self.tasks])
>         return f"MultiDataset(tasks: {task_str})"
> 
>     def __getitem__(self,key):
>         if isinstance(key, int):
>             task_idx, example_idx = self.task_choice_list[key]
>             task = self.tasks[task_idx]
>             example = task[example_idx]
>             example["task_name"] = task.info.builder_name
>             return example
>         elif isinstance(key, slice):
>             raise NotImplementedError()
> 
>     def __iter__(self):
>         for i in range(len(self)):
>             yield self[i]
> 
> 
> def load_multitask(*datasets):
>     '''Create multitask datasets per split'''
> 
>     def _get_common_splits(datasets):
>         '''Finds the common splits present in all self.datasets'''
>         min_set = None
>         for dataset in datasets:
>             if min_set != None:
>                 min_set.intersection(set(dataset.keys()))
>             else:
>                 min_set = set(dataset.keys())
>         return min_set
> 
>     common_splits = _get_common_splits(datasets)
>     out = {}
>     for split in common_splits:
>         out[split] = MultiDataset([d[split] for d in datasets])
>     return out
> 
> 
> ##########################################
> # Dataset Flattening
> 
> def flatten(dataset,flatten_fn):
>     for k in dataset.keys():
>         if isinstance(dataset[k],nlp.Dataset):
>             dataset[k] = dataset[k].map(flatten_fn,remove_columns=dataset[k].column_names)
> 
> # Squad
> def flatten_squad(example):
>     return {"source": "squad context: " + example['context'] + " question: " + example['question'],
>           "target":example["answers"]["text"]}
> squad = nlp.load_dataset("squad")
> flatten(squad,flatten_squad)
> 
> # CNN_DM
> def flatten_cnn_dm(example):
>     return {"source": "cnn_dm: " + example['article'],"target":[example["highlights"]]}
> cnn_dm = nlp.load_dataset("cnn_dailymail", "3.0.0")
> flatten(cnn_dm,flatten_cnn_dm)
> 
> #############################################
> 
> mtds = load_multitask(squad,cnn_dm)
> 
> for example in mtds["train"]:
>     print(example["task_name"],example["target"])
> ```
> 
> Let me know if you have any thoughts. I've started using this in some of my projects and it seems to work. If people are happy with the general approach for a first version, I can make a pull request.

Not sure if this is what I'm looking for, but I implemented a version of Examples-Proportional mixing supporting only the basic feature [here](https://stackoverflow.com/a/74070116/10732321), seems to work in my project. 

You can use `interleave_datasets` to mix several datasets together. By default it alternates between all the datasets, but you can also provide sampling probabilities if you want to oversample from one of the datasets

```python
from datasets import load_dataset, interleave_datasets

squad = load_dataset("squad", split="train")
cnn_dm = load_dataset("cnn_dailymail", "3.0.0", split="train")
ds = interleave_datasets([squad, cnn_dm])

print(ds[0])
# {'id': '5733be284776f41900661182',
#  'title': 'University_of_Notre_Dame',
#  'context': 'Architecturally, the school has a Catholic character...',
#  'question': 'To whom did the Virgin Mary allegedly appear in 1858 in Lourdes France?',
#  'answers': {'text': ['Saint Bernadette Soubirous'], 'answer_start': [515]},
#  'article': None,
#  'highlights': None}
print(ds[1])
# {'id': '42c027e4ff9730fbb3de84c1af0d2c506e41c3e4',
#  'title': None,
#  'context': None,
#  'question': None,
#  'answers': None,
#  'article': 'LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe...',
#  'highlights': "Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe..."}
```

see docs at https://huggingface.co/docs/datasets/v2.6.1/en/package_reference/main_classes#datasets.interleave_datasets

I also have this implementation of multi-task sampler here which I used it to tune T5: https://github.com/rabeehk/hyperformer/blob/main/hyperformer/data/multitask_sampler.py