bert-serving-server 1.10.0
Mapping a variable-length sentence to a fixed-length vector using BERT model (Server)
License: MIT
Keywords: bert nlp tensorflow machine learning sentence encoding embedding serving

> **This README.md is a mirror for PyPI. Please visit https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service/blob/master/README.md for the latest README.md.**
<h1 align="center">bert-as-service</h1>

<p align="center">Using BERT model as a sentence encoding service, i.e. mapping a variable-length sentence to a fixed-length vector.</p>

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<p align="center">
  <a href="#highlights">Highlights</a> •
  <a href="#what-is-it">What is it</a> •
  <a href="#install">Install</a> •
  <a href="#getting-started">Getting Started</a> •
  <a href="#server-and-client-api">API</a> •
  <a href="#book-tutorial">Tutorials</a> •
  <a href="#speech_balloon-faq">FAQ</a> •
  <a href="#zap-benchmark">Benchmark</a> •
  <a href="https://hanxiao.github.io/2019/01/02/Serving-Google-BERT-in-Production-using-Tensorflow-and-ZeroMQ/" target="_blank">Blog</a>

</p>

<p align="center">
    <img src=".github/demo.gif?raw=true" width="700">
</p>

<h6 align="center">Made by Han Xiao • :globe_with_meridians: <a href="https://hanxiao.github.io">https://hanxiao.github.io</a></h6>


<center>
<table>
  <tr>
  <td width="25%"><a href="https://github.com/gnes-ai/gnes">
      <img src=".github/gnes-logo-tight.svg" alt="GNES is Generic Neural Elastic Search (logo made by Han Xiao)">
      </a></td>
  <td>
  <b>✨Looking for X-as-service? Or more generic and cloud-native solution?</b>
  <p><br>Checkout my new project <a href="https://github.com/gnes-ai/gnes">GNES</a>! GNES is Generic Neural Elastic Search, a cloud-native semantic search system based on deep neural network. GNES enables large-scale index and semantic search for text-to-text, image-to-image, video-to-video and any-to-any content form.</p>
</td>
  </tr>
</table>
</center>

<h2 align="center">What is it</h2>

**BERT** is a NLP model [developed by Google](https://github.com/google-research/bert) for pre-training language representations. It leverages an enormous amount of plain text data publicly available on the web and is trained in an unsupervised manner. Pre-training a BERT model is a fairly expensive yet one-time procedure for each language. Fortunately, Google released several pre-trained models where [you can download from here](https://github.com/google-research/bert#pre-trained-models).


**Sentence Encoding/Embedding** is a upstream task required in many NLP applications, e.g. sentiment analysis, text classification. The goal is to represent a variable length sentence into a fixed length vector, e.g. `hello world` to `[0.1, 0.3, 0.9]`. Each element of the vector should "encode" some semantics of the original sentence.

**Finally, `bert-as-service`** uses BERT as a sentence encoder and hosts it as a service via ZeroMQ, allowing you to map sentences into fixed-length representations in just two lines of code. 

<h2 align="center">Highlights</h2>

- :telescope: **State-of-the-art**: build on pretrained 12/24-layer BERT models released by Google AI, which is considered as a milestone in the NLP community.
- :hatching_chick: **Easy-to-use**: require only two lines of code to get sentence/token-level encodes.
- :zap: **Fast**: 900 sentences/s on a single Tesla M40 24GB. Low latency, optimized for speed. See [benchmark](#zap-benchmark).
- :octopus: **Scalable**: scale nicely and smoothly on multiple GPUs and multiple clients without worrying about concurrency. See [benchmark](#speed-wrt-num_client).
- :gem: **Reliable**: tested on multi-billion sentences; days of running without a break or OOM or any nasty exceptions.

More features: [XLA & FP16 support](#speed-wrt--fp16-and--xla); mix GPU-CPU workloads; optimized graph; `tf.data` friendly; customized tokenizer; flexible pooling strategy; [build-in HTTP server](#using-bert-as-service-to-serve-http-requests-in-json) and dashboard; [async encoding](#asynchronous-encoding); [multicasting](#broadcasting-to-multiple-clients); etc.


<h2 align="center">Install</h2>

Install the server and client via `pip`. They can be installed separately or even on *different* machines:
```bash
pip install bert-serving-server  # server
pip install bert-serving-client  # client, independent of `bert-serving-server`
```

Note that the server MUST be running on **Python >= 3.5** with **Tensorflow >= 1.10** (*one-point-ten*). Again, the server does not support Python 2!

:point_up: The client can be running on both Python 2 and 3 [for the following consideration](#q-can-i-run-it-in-python-2).

<h2 align="center">Getting Started</h2>

#### 1. Download a Pre-trained BERT Model
Download a model listed below, then uncompress the zip file into some folder, say `/tmp/english_L-12_H-768_A-12/`

<details>
 <summary>List of released pretrained BERT models (click to expand...)</summary>


<table>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_10_18/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12.zip">BERT-Base, Uncased</a></td><td>12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_10_18/uncased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.zip">BERT-Large, Uncased</a></td><td>24-layer, 1024-hidden, 16-heads, 340M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_10_18/cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.zip">BERT-Base, Cased</a></td><td>12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads , 110M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_10_18/cased_L-24_H-1024_A-16.zip">BERT-Large, Cased</a></td><td>24-layer, 1024-hidden, 16-heads, 340M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_11_23/multi_cased_L-12_H-768_A-12.zip">BERT-Base, Multilingual Cased (New)</a></td><td>104 languages, 12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_11_03/multilingual_L-12_H-768_A-12.zip">BERT-Base, Multilingual Cased (Old)</a></td><td>102 languages, 12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters</td></tr>
<tr><td><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/bert_models/2018_11_03/chinese_L-12_H-768_A-12.zip">BERT-Base, Chinese</a></td><td>Chinese Simplified and Traditional, 12-layer, 768-hidden, 12-heads, 110M parameters</td></tr>
</table>

</details>


> **Optional:** fine-tuning the model on your downstream task. [Why is it optional?](#q-are-you-suggesting-using-bert-without-fine-tuning)

#### 2. Start the BERT service
After installing the server, you should be able to use `bert-serving-start` CLI as follows:
```bash
bert-serving-start -model_dir /tmp/english_L-12_H-768_A-12/ -num_worker=4 
```
This will start a service with four workers, meaning that it can handle up to four **concurrent** requests. More concurrent requests will be queued in a load balancer. Details can be found in our [FAQ](#q-what-is-the-parallel-processing-model-behind-the-scene) and [the benchmark on number of clients](#speed-wrt-num_client).

Below shows what the server looks like when starting correctly:
<p align="center"><img src=".github/server-demo.gif?raw=true"/></p>

<details>
 <summary>Alternatively, one can start the BERT Service in a Docker Container (click to expand...)</summary>

```bash
docker build -t bert-as-service -f ./docker/Dockerfile .
NUM_WORKER=1
PATH_MODEL=/PATH_TO/_YOUR_MODEL/
docker run --runtime nvidia -dit -p 5555:5555 -p 5556:5556 -v $PATH_MODEL:/model -t bert-as-service $NUM_WORKER
```
</details>


#### 3. Use Client to Get Sentence Encodes
Now you can encode sentences simply as follows:
```python
from bert_serving.client import BertClient
bc = BertClient()
bc.encode(['First do it', 'then do it right', 'then do it better'])
```
It will return a `ndarray` (or `List[List[float]]` if you wish), in which each row is a fixed-length vector representing a sentence. Having thousands of sentences? Just `encode`! *Don't even bother to batch*, the server will take care of it.

As a feature of BERT, you may get encodes of a pair of sentences by concatenating them with ` ||| ` (with whitespace before and after), e.g.
```python
bc.encode(['First do it ||| then do it right'])
```

Below shows what the server looks like while encoding:
<p align="center"><img src=".github/server-run-demo.gif?raw=true"/></p>

#### Use BERT Service Remotely
One may also start the service on one (GPU) machine and call it from another (CPU) machine as follows:

```python
# on another CPU machine
from bert_serving.client import BertClient
bc = BertClient(ip='xx.xx.xx.xx')  # ip address of the GPU machine
bc.encode(['First do it', 'then do it right', 'then do it better'])
```

Note that you only need `pip install -U bert-serving-client` in this case, the server side is not required. You may also [call the service via HTTP requests.](#using-bert-as-service-to-serve-http-requests-in-json)

> :bulb: **Want to learn more? Checkout our tutorials:**
> - [Building a QA semantic search engine in 3 min.](#building-a-qa-semantic-search-engine-in-3-minutes)
> - [Serving a fine-tuned BERT model](#serving-a-fine-tuned-bert-model)
> - [Getting ELMo-like contextual word embedding](#getting-elmo-like-contextual-word-embedding)
> - [Using your own tokenizer](#using-your-own-tokenizer)
> - [Using `BertClient` with `tf.data` API](#using-bertclient-with-tfdata-api)
> - [Training a text classifier using BERT features and tf.estimator API](#training-a-text-classifier-using-bert-features-and-tfestimator-api)
> - [Saving and loading with TFRecord data](#saving-and-loading-with-tfrecord-data)
> - [Asynchronous encoding](#asynchronous-encoding)
> - [Broadcasting to multiple clients](#broadcasting-to-multiple-clients)
> - [Monitoring the service status in a dashboard](#monitoring-the-service-status-in-a-dashboard)
> - [Using `bert-as-service` to serve HTTP requests in JSON](#using-bert-as-service-to-serve-http-requests-in-json)
> - [Starting `BertServer` from Python](#starting-bertserver-from-python)


<h2 align="center">Server and Client API</h2>
<p align="right"><a href="#bert-as-service"><sup>▴ Back to top</sup></a></p>

[![ReadTheDoc](https://readthedocs.org/projects/bert-as-service/badge/?version=latest&style=for-the-badge)](http://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io)

The best way to learn `bert-as-service` **latest API** is [reading the documentation](http://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io).

### Server API

[Please always refer to the latest server-side API documented here.](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/source/server.html#server-side-api), you may get the latest usage via:
```bash
bert-serving-start --help
bert-serving-terminate --help
bert-serving-benchmark --help
```

| Argument | Type | Default | Description |
|--------------------|------|-------------|----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| `model_dir` | str | *Required* | folder path of the pre-trained BERT model. |
| `tuned_model_dir`| str |(Optional)| folder path of a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| `ckpt_name`| str | `bert_model.ckpt` | filename of the checkpoint file. |
| `config_name`| str | `bert_config.json` | filename of the JSON config file for BERT model. |
| `graph_tmp_dir` | str | None | path to graph temp file |  
| `max_seq_len` | int | `25` | maximum length of sequence, longer sequence will be trimmed on the right side. Set it to NONE for dynamically using the longest sequence in a (mini)batch. |
| `cased_tokenization` | bool | False | Whether tokenizer should skip the default lowercasing and accent removal. Should be used for e.g. the multilingual cased pretrained BERT model. |
| `mask_cls_sep` | bool | False | masking the embedding on [CLS] and [SEP] with zero. |
| `num_worker` | int | `1` | number of (GPU/CPU) worker runs BERT model, each works in a separate process. |
| `max_batch_size` | int | `256` | maximum number of sequences handled by each worker, larger batch will be partitioned into small batches. |
| `priority_batch_size` | int | `16` | batch smaller than this size will be labeled as high priority, and jumps forward in the job queue to get result faster |
| `port` | int | `5555` | port for pushing data from client to server |
| `port_out` | int | `5556`| port for publishing results from server to client |
| `http_port` | int | None | server port for receiving HTTP requests |
| `cors` | str | `*` | setting "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" for HTTP requests |
| `pooling_strategy` | str | `REDUCE_MEAN` | the pooling strategy for generating encoding vectors, valid values are `NONE`, `REDUCE_MEAN`, `REDUCE_MAX`, `REDUCE_MEAN_MAX`, `CLS_TOKEN`, `FIRST_TOKEN`, `SEP_TOKEN`, `LAST_TOKEN`. Explanation of these strategies [can be found here](#q-what-are-the-available-pooling-strategies). To get encoding for each token in the sequence, please set this to `NONE`.|
| `pooling_layer` | list | `[-2]` | the encoding layer that pooling operates on, where `-1` means the last layer, `-2` means the second-to-last, `[-1, -2]` means concatenating the result of last two layers, etc.|
| `gpu_memory_fraction` | float | `0.5` | the fraction of the overall amount of memory that each GPU should be allocated per worker |
| `cpu` | bool | False | run on CPU instead of GPU |
| `xla` | bool | False | enable [XLA compiler](https://www.tensorflow.org/xla/jit) for graph optimization (*experimental!*) |
| `fp16` | bool | False | use float16 precision (experimental) |
| `device_map` | list | `[]` | specify the list of GPU device ids that will be used (id starts from 0)|
| `show_tokens_to_client` | bool | False | sending tokenization results to client | 

### Client API

[Please always refer to the latest client-side API documented here.](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/source/client.html#module-client) Client-side provides a Python class called `BertClient`, which accepts arguments as follows:

| Argument | Type | Default | Description |
|----------------------|------|-----------|-------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
| `ip` | str | `localhost` | IP address of the server |
| `port` | int | `5555` | port for pushing data from client to server, *must be consistent with the server side config* |
| `port_out` | int | `5556`| port for publishing results from server to client, *must be consistent with the server side config* |
| `output_fmt` | str | `ndarray` | the output format of the sentence encodes, either in numpy array or python List[List[float]] (`ndarray`/`list`) |
| `show_server_config` | bool | `False` | whether to show server configs when first connected |
| `check_version` | bool | `True` | whether to force client and server to have the same version |
| `identity` | str | `None` | a UUID that identifies the client, useful in multi-casting |
| `timeout` | int | `-1` | set the timeout (milliseconds) for receive operation on the client |

A `BertClient` implements the following methods and properties:

| Method |  Description |
|--------|------|
|`.encode()`|Encode a list of strings to a list of vectors|
|`.encode_async()`|Asynchronous encode batches from a generator|
|`.fetch()`|Fetch all encoded vectors from server and return them in a generator, use it with `.encode_async()` or `.encode(blocking=False)`. Sending order is NOT preserved.|
|`.fetch_all()`|Fetch all encoded vectors from server and return them in a list, use it with `.encode_async()` or `.encode(blocking=False)`. Sending order is preserved.|
|`.close()`|Gracefully close the connection between the client and the server|
|`.status`|Get the client status in JSON format|
|`.server_status`|Get the server status in JSON format|


<h2 align="center">:book: Tutorial</h2>
<p align="right"><a href="#bert-as-service"><sup>▴ Back to top</sup></a></p>

[![ReadTheDoc](https://readthedocs.org/projects/bert-as-service/badge/?version=latest&style=for-the-badge)](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/section/faq.html)

The full list of examples can be found in [`example/`](example). You can run each via `python example/example-k.py`. Most of examples require you to start a BertServer first, please follow [the instruction here](#2-start-the-bert-service). Note that although `BertClient` works universally on both Python 2.x and 3.x, examples are only tested on Python 3.6.

<details>
 <summary>Table of contents (click to expand...)</summary>

> - [Building a QA semantic search engine in 3 min.](#building-a-qa-semantic-search-engine-in-3-minutes)
> - [Serving a fine-tuned BERT model](#serving-a-fine-tuned-bert-model)
> - [Getting ELMo-like contextual word embedding](#getting-elmo-like-contextual-word-embedding)
> - [Using your own tokenizer](#using-your-own-tokenizer)
> - [Using `BertClient` with `tf.data` API](#using-bertclient-with-tfdata-api)
> - [Training a text classifier using BERT features and tf.estimator API](#training-a-text-classifier-using-bert-features-and-tfestimator-api)
> - [Saving and loading with TFRecord data](#saving-and-loading-with-tfrecord-data)
> - [Asynchronous encoding](#asynchronous-encoding)
> - [Broadcasting to multiple clients](#broadcasting-to-multiple-clients)
> - [Monitoring the service status in a dashboard](#monitoring-the-service-status-in-a-dashboard)
> - [Using `bert-as-service` to serve HTTP requests in JSON](#using-bert-as-service-to-serve-http-requests-in-json)
> - [Starting `BertServer` from Python](#starting-bertserver-from-python)

</details>

### Building a QA semantic search engine in 3 minutes

> The complete example can [be found example8.py](example/example8.py).

As the first example, we will implement a simple QA search engine using `bert-as-service` in just three minutes. No kidding! The goal is to find similar questions to user's input and return the corresponding answer. To start, we need a list of question-answer pairs. Fortunately, this README file already contains [a list of FAQ](#speech_balloon-faq), so I will just use that to make this example perfectly self-contained. Let's first load all questions and show some statistics.

```python
prefix_q = '##### **Q:** '
with open('README.md') as fp:
    questions = [v.replace(prefix_q, '').strip() for v in fp if v.strip() and v.startswith(prefix_q)]
    print('%d questions loaded, avg. len of %d' % (len(questions), np.mean([len(d.split()) for d in questions])))
```

This gives `33 questions loaded, avg. len of 9`. So looks like we have enough questions. Now start a BertServer with `uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12` pretrained BERT model:
```bash
bert-serving-start -num_worker=1 -model_dir=/data/cips/data/lab/data/model/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12
```

Next, we need to encode our questions into vectors:
```python
bc = BertClient(port=4000, port_out=4001)
doc_vecs = bc.encode(questions)
```

Finally, we are ready to receive new query and perform a simple "fuzzy" search against the existing questions. To do that, every time a new query is coming, we encode it as a vector and compute its dot product with `doc_vecs`; sort the result descendingly; and return the top-k similar questions as follows: 
```python
while True:
    query = input('your question: ')
    query_vec = bc.encode([query])[0]
    # compute normalized dot product as score
    score = np.sum(query_vec * doc_vecs, axis=1) / np.linalg.norm(doc_vecs, axis=1)
    topk_idx = np.argsort(score)[::-1][:topk]
    for idx in topk_idx:
        print('> %s\t%s' % (score[idx], questions[idx]))
```

That's it! Now run the code and type your query, see how this search engine handles fuzzy match:
<p align="center"><img src=".github/qasearch-demo.gif?raw=true"/></p>

### Serving a fine-tuned BERT model

Pretrained BERT models often show quite "okayish" performance on many tasks. However, to release the true power of BERT a fine-tuning on the downstream task (or on domain-specific data) is necessary. In this example, I will show you how to serve a fine-tuned BERT model.

We follow the instruction in ["Sentence (and sentence-pair) classification tasks"](https://github.com/google-research/bert#sentence-and-sentence-pair-classification-tasks) and use `run_classifier.py` to fine tune `uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12` model on MRPC task. The fine-tuned model is stored at `/tmp/mrpc_output/`, which can be changed by specifying `--output_dir` of `run_classifier.py`.

If you look into `/tmp/mrpc_output/`, it contains something like:
```bash
checkpoint                                        128
eval                                              4.0K
eval_results.txt                                  86
eval.tf_record                                    219K
events.out.tfevents.1545202214.TENCENT64.site     6.1M
events.out.tfevents.1545203242.TENCENT64.site     14M
graph.pbtxt                                       9.0M
model.ckpt-0.data-00000-of-00001                  1.3G
model.ckpt-0.index                                23K
model.ckpt-0.meta                                 3.9M
model.ckpt-343.data-00000-of-00001                1.3G
model.ckpt-343.index                              23K
model.ckpt-343.meta                               3.9M
train.tf_record                                   2.0M
```

Don't be afraid of those mysterious files, as the only important one to us is `model.ckpt-343.data-00000-of-00001` (looks like my training stops at the 343 step. One may get `model.ckpt-123.data-00000-of-00001` or `model.ckpt-9876.data-00000-of-00001` depending on the total training steps). Now we have collected all three pieces of information that are needed for serving this fine-tuned model:
- The pretrained model is downloaded to `/path/to/bert/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12`
- Our fine-tuned model is stored at `/tmp/mrpc_output/`;
- Our fine-tuned model checkpoint is named as `model.ckpt-343` something something.

Now start a BertServer by putting three pieces together:

```bash
bert-serving-start -model_dir=/pretrained/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12 -tuned_model_dir=/tmp/mrpc_output/ -ckpt_name=model.ckpt-343
```

After the server started, you should find this line in the log:
```text
I:GRAPHOPT:[gra:opt: 50]:checkpoint (override by fine-tuned model): /tmp/mrpc_output/model.ckpt-343
```
Which means the BERT parameters is overrode and successfully loaded from our fine-tuned `/tmp/mrpc_output/model.ckpt-343`. Done!

In short, find your fine-tuned model path and checkpoint name, then feed them to `-tuned_model_dir` and `-ckpt_name`, respectively.

### Getting ELMo-like contextual word embedding

Start the server with `pooling_strategy` set to NONE.
```bash
bert-serving-start -pooling_strategy NONE -model_dir /tmp/english_L-12_H-768_A-12/
```

To get the word embedding corresponds to every token, you can simply use slice index as follows:
```python
# max_seq_len = 25
# pooling_strategy = NONE

bc = BertClient()
vec = bc.encode(['hey you', 'whats up?'])

vec  # [2, 25, 768]
vec[0]  # [1, 25, 768], sentence embeddings for `hey you`
vec[0][0]  # [1, 1, 768], word embedding for `[CLS]`
vec[0][1]  # [1, 1, 768], word embedding for `hey`
vec[0][2]  # [1, 1, 768], word embedding for `you`
vec[0][3]  # [1, 1, 768], word embedding for `[SEP]`
vec[0][4]  # [1, 1, 768], word embedding for padding symbol
vec[0][25]  # error, out of index!
```

Note that no matter how long your original sequence is, the service will always return a `[max_seq_len, 768]` matrix for every sequence. When using slice index to get the word embedding, beware of the special tokens padded to the sequence, i.e. `[CLS]`, `[SEP]`, `0_PAD`. 

### Using your own tokenizer

Often you want to use your own tokenizer to segment sentences instead of the default one from BERT. Simply call `encode(is_tokenized=True)` on the client slide as follows:

```python
texts = ['hello world!', 'good day']

# a naive whitespace tokenizer
texts2 = [s.split() for s in texts]

vecs = bc.encode(texts2, is_tokenized=True)
```
This gives `[2, 25, 768]` tensor where the first `[1, 25, 768]` corresponds to the token-level encoding of "hello world!". If you look into its values, you will find that only the first four elements, i.e. `[1, 0:3, 768]` have values, all the others are zeros. This is due to the fact that BERT considers "hello world!" as four tokens: `[CLS]` `hello` `world!` `[SEP]`, the rest are padding symbols and are masked out before output.

Note that there is no need to start a separate server for handling tokenized/untokenized sentences. The server can tell and handle both cases automatically.

Sometimes you want to know explicitly the tokenization performed on the server side to have better understanding of the embedding result. One such case is asking word embedding from the server (with `-pooling_strategy NONE`), one wants to tell which word is tokenized and which is unrecognized. You can get such information with the following steps:

 1. enabling `-show_tokens_to_client` on the server side;
 2. calling the server via `encode(..., show_tokens=True)`.

For example, a basic usage like

```python
bc.encode(['hello world!', 'thisis it'], show_tokens=True)
```
returns a tuple, where the first element is the embedding and the second is the tokenization result from the server:

```text
(array([[[ 0.        , -0.        ,  0.        , ...,  0.        , -0.        , -0.        ],
        [ 1.1100919 , -0.20474958,  0.9895898 , ...,  0.3873255  , -1.4093989 , -0.47620595],
        ..., -0.        , -0.        ]],

       [[ 0.        , -0.        ,  0.        , ...,  0.        , 0.        ,  0.        ],
        [ 0.6293478 , -0.4088499 ,  0.6022662 , ...,  0.41740108, 1.214456  ,  1.2532915 ],
        ..., 0.        ,  0.        ]]], dtype=float32),

          [['[CLS]', 'hello', 'world', '!', '[SEP]'], ['[CLS]', 'this', '##is', 'it', '[SEP]']])
```

When using your own tokenization, you may still want to check if the server respects your tokens. For example,  
```python
bc.encode([['hello', 'world!'], ['thisis', 'it']], show_tokens=True, is_tokenized=True)
```
returns:

```text
(array([[[ 0.        , -0.        ,  0.        , ...,  0.       ,  -0.        ,  0.        ],
        [ 1.1111546 , -0.56572634,  0.37183186, ...,  0.02397121,  -0.5445367 ,  1.1009651 ],
        ..., -0.        ,  0.        ]],

       [[ 0.        ,  0.        ,  0.        , ...,  0.        ,  -0.        ,  0.        ],
        [ 0.39262453,  0.3782491 ,  0.27096173, ...,  0.7122045 ,  -0.9874849 ,  0.9318679 ],
        ..., -0.        ,  0.        ]]], dtype=float32),

         [['[CLS]', 'hello', '[UNK]', '[SEP]'], ['[CLS]', '[UNK]', 'it', '[SEP]']])
```

One can observe that `world!` and `thisis` are not recognized on the server, hence they are set to `[UNK]`.

Finally, beware that the pretrained BERT Chinese from Google is character-based, i.e. its vocabulary is made of single Chinese characters. Therefore it makes no sense if you use word-level segmentation algorithm to pre-process the data and feed to such model.

Extremely curious readers may notice that the first row in the above example is all-zero even though the tokenization result includes `[CLS]` (well done, detective!). The reason is that the tokenization result will **always** includes `[CLS]` and `[UNK]` regardless the setting of `-mask_cls_sep`. This could be useful when you want to align the tokens afterwards. Remember, `-mask_cls_sep` only masks `[CLS]` and `[SEP]` out of the computation. It doesn't affect the tokenization algorithm.


### Using `BertClient` with `tf.data` API

> The complete example can [be found example4.py](example/example4.py). There is also [an example in Keras](https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service/issues/29#issuecomment-442362241). 

The [`tf.data`](https://www.tensorflow.org/guide/datasets) API enables you to build complex input pipelines from simple, reusable pieces. One can also use `BertClient` to encode sentences on-the-fly and use the vectors in a downstream model. Here is an example:

```python
batch_size = 256
num_parallel_calls = 4
num_clients = num_parallel_calls * 2  # should be at least greater than `num_parallel_calls`

# start a pool of clients
bc_clients = [BertClient(show_server_config=False) for _ in range(num_clients)]


def get_encodes(x):
    # x is `batch_size` of lines, each of which is a json object
    samples = [json.loads(l) for l in x]
    text = [s['raw_text'] for s in samples]  # List[List[str]]
    labels = [s['label'] for s in samples]  # List[str]
    # get a client from available clients
    bc_client = bc_clients.pop()
    features = bc_client.encode(text)
    # after use, put it back
    bc_clients.append(bc_client)
    return features, labels


ds = (tf.data.TextLineDataset(train_fp).batch(batch_size)
        .map(lambda x: tf.py_func(get_encodes, [x], [tf.float32, tf.string]),  num_parallel_calls=num_parallel_calls)
        .map(lambda x, y: {'feature': x, 'label': y})
        .make_one_shot_iterator().get_next())
```

The trick here is to start a pool of `BertClient` and reuse them one by one. In this way, we can fully harness the power of `num_parallel_calls` of `Dataset.map()` API.  


### Training a text classifier using BERT features and `tf.estimator` API

> The complete example can [be found example5.py](example/example5.py).

Following the last example, we can easily extend it to a full classifier using `tf.estimator` API. One only need minor change on the input function as follows:

```python
estimator = DNNClassifier(
    hidden_units=[512],
    feature_columns=[tf.feature_column.numeric_column('feature', shape=(768,))],
    n_classes=len(laws),
    config=run_config,
    label_vocabulary=laws_str,
    dropout=0.1)

input_fn = lambda fp: (tf.data.TextLineDataset(fp)
                       .apply(tf.contrib.data.shuffle_and_repeat(buffer_size=10000))
                       .batch(batch_size)
                       .map(lambda x: tf.py_func(get_encodes, [x], [tf.float32, tf.string]), num_parallel_calls=num_parallel_calls)
                       .map(lambda x, y: ({'feature': x}, y))
                       .prefetch(20))

train_spec = TrainSpec(input_fn=lambda: input_fn(train_fp))
eval_spec = EvalSpec(input_fn=lambda: input_fn(eval_fp), throttle_secs=0)
train_and_evaluate(estimator, train_spec, eval_spec)
```

The complete example can [be found example5.py](example/example5.py), in which a simple MLP is built on BERT features for predicting the relevant articles according to the fact description in the law documents. The problem is a part of the [Chinese AI and Law Challenge Competition](https://github.com/thunlp/CAIL/blob/master/README_en.md).


### Saving and loading with TFRecord data

> The complete example can [be found example6.py](example/example6.py). 

The TFRecord file format is a simple record-oriented binary format that many TensorFlow applications use for training data. You can also pre-encode all your sequences and store their encodings to a TFRecord file, then later load it to build a `tf.Dataset`. For example, to write encoding into a TFRecord file:

```python
bc = BertClient()
list_vec = bc.encode(lst_str)
list_label = [0 for _ in lst_str]  # a dummy list of all-zero labels

# write to tfrecord
with tf.python_io.TFRecordWriter('tmp.tfrecord') as writer:
    def create_float_feature(values):
        return tf.train.Feature(float_list=tf.train.FloatList(value=values))

    def create_int_feature(values):
        return tf.train.Feature(int64_list=tf.train.Int64List(value=list(values)))

    for (vec, label) in zip(list_vec, list_label):
        features = {'features': create_float_feature(vec), 'labels': create_int_feature([label])}
        tf_example = tf.train.Example(features=tf.train.Features(feature=features))
        writer.write(tf_example.SerializeToString())
```

Now we can load from it and build a `tf.Dataset`:
```python
def _decode_record(record):
    """Decodes a record to a TensorFlow example."""
    return tf.parse_single_example(record, {
        'features': tf.FixedLenFeature([768], tf.float32),
        'labels': tf.FixedLenFeature([], tf.int64),
    })

ds = (tf.data.TFRecordDataset('tmp.tfrecord').repeat().shuffle(buffer_size=100).apply(
    tf.contrib.data.map_and_batch(lambda record: _decode_record(record), batch_size=64))
      .make_one_shot_iterator().get_next())
```

To save word/token-level embedding to TFRecord, one needs to first flatten `[max_seq_len, num_hidden]` tensor into an 1D array as follows:
```python
def create_float_feature(values):
    return tf.train.Feature(float_list=tf.train.FloatList(value=values.reshape(-1)))
```
And later reconstruct the shape when loading it:
```python
name_to_features = {
    "feature": tf.FixedLenFeature([max_seq_length * num_hidden], tf.float32),
    "label_ids": tf.FixedLenFeature([], tf.int64),
}

def _decode_record(record, name_to_features):
    """Decodes a record to a TensorFlow example."""
    example = tf.parse_single_example(record, name_to_features)
    example['feature'] = tf.reshape(example['feature'], [max_seq_length, -1])
    return example
```
Be careful, this will generate a huge TFRecord file.

### Asynchronous encoding

> The complete example can [be found example2.py](example/example2.py).

`BertClient.encode()` offers a nice synchronous way to get sentence encodes. However,   sometimes we want to do it in an asynchronous manner by feeding all textual data to the server first, fetching the encoded results later. This can be easily done by:
```python
# an endless data stream, generating data in an extremely fast speed
def text_gen():
    while True:
        yield lst_str  # yield a batch of text lines

bc = BertClient()

# get encoded vectors
for j in bc.encode_async(text_gen(), max_num_batch=10):
    print('received %d x %d' % (j.shape[0], j.shape[1]))
```

### Broadcasting to multiple clients

> The complete example can [be found in example3.py](example/example3.py).

The encoded result is routed to the client according to its identity. If you have multiple clients with same identity, then they all receive the results! You can use this *multicast* feature to do some cool things, e.g. training multiple different models (some using `scikit-learn` some using `tensorflow`) in multiple separated processes while only call `BertServer` once. In the example below, `bc` and its two clones will all receive encoded vector.

```python
# clone a client by reusing the identity 
def client_clone(id, idx):
    bc = BertClient(identity=id)
    for j in bc.listen():
        print('clone-client-%d: received %d x %d' % (idx, j.shape[0], j.shape[1]))

bc = BertClient()
# start two cloned clients sharing the same identity as bc
for j in range(2):
    threading.Thread(target=client_clone, args=(bc.identity, j)).start()

for _ in range(3):
    bc.encode(lst_str)
```

### Monitoring the service status in a dashboard

> The complete example can [be found in plugin/dashboard/](plugin/dashboard).

As a part of the infrastructure, one may also want to monitor the service status and show it in a dashboard. To do that, we can use:
```python
bc = BertClient(ip='server_ip')

json.dumps(bc.server_status, ensure_ascii=False)
```

This gives the current status of the server including number of requests, number of clients etc. in JSON format. The only thing remained is to start a HTTP server for returning this JSON to the frontend that renders it.

Alternatively, one may simply expose an HTTP port when starting a server via:

```bash
bert-serving-start -http_port 8001 -model_dir ...
```

This will allow one to use javascript or `curl` to fetch the server status at port 8001.

`plugin/dashboard/index.html` shows a simple dashboard based on Bootstrap and Vue.js.

<p align="center"><img src=".github/dashboard.png?raw=true"/></p>

### Using `bert-as-service` to serve HTTP requests in JSON

Besides calling `bert-as-service` from Python, one can also call it via HTTP request in JSON. It is quite useful especially when low transport layer is prohibited. Behind the scene, `bert-as-service` spawns a Flask server in a separate process and then reuse a `BertClient` instance as a proxy to communicate with the ventilator.

To enable the build-in HTTP server, we need to first (re)install the server with some extra Python dependencies:
```bash
pip install -U bert-serving-server[http]
```

Then simply start the server with:
```bash
bert-serving-start -model_dir=/YOUR_MODEL -http_port 8125
```

Done! Your server is now listening HTTP and TCP requests at port `8125` simultaneously!

To send a HTTP request, first prepare the payload in JSON as following:
```json
{
    "id": 123,
    "texts": ["hello world", "good day!"],
    "is_tokenized": false
}
```
, where `id` is a unique identifier helping you to synchronize the results; `is_tokenized` follows the meaning in [`BertClient` API](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/source/client.html#client.BertClient.encode_async) and `false` by default.

Then simply call the server at `/encode` via HTTP POST request. You can use javascript or whatever, here is an example using `curl`:
```bash
curl -X POST http://xx.xx.xx.xx:8125/encode \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"id": 123,"texts": ["hello world"], "is_tokenized": false}'
```
, which returns a JSON:
```json
{
    "id": 123,
    "results": [[768 float-list], [768 float-list]],
    "status": 200
}
```

To get the server's status and client's status, you can send GET requests at `/status/server` and `/status/client`, respectively.

Finally, one may also config CORS to restrict the public access of the server by specifying `-cors` when starting `bert-serving-start`. By default `-cors=*`, meaning the server is public accessible.


### Starting `BertServer` from Python

Besides shell, one can also start a `BertServer` from python. Simply do
```python
from bert_serving.server.helper import get_args_parser
from bert_serving.server import BertServer
args = get_args_parser().parse_args(['-model_dir', 'YOUR_MODEL_PATH_HERE',
                                     '-port', '5555',
                                     '-port_out', '5556',
                                     '-max_seq_len', 'NONE',
                                     '-mask_cls_sep',
                                     '-cpu'])
server = BertServer(args)
server.start()
``` 

Note that it's basically mirroring the arg-parsing behavior in CLI, so everything in that `.parse_args([])` list should be string, e.g. `['-port', '5555']` not `['-port', 5555]`.

To shutdown the server, you may call the static method in `BertServer` class via:
```python
BertServer.shutdown(port=5555)
```

Or via shell CLI:
```bash
bert-serving-terminate -port 5555
```

This will terminate the server running on localhost at port 5555. You may also use it to terminate a remote server, see `bert-serving-terminate --help` for details.


<h2 align="center">:speech_balloon: FAQ</h2>
<p align="right"><a href="#bert-as-service"><sup>▴ Back to top</sup></a></p>

[![ReadTheDoc](https://readthedocs.org/projects/bert-as-service/badge/?version=latest&style=for-the-badge)](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/section/faq.html)

##### **Q:** Do you have a paper or other written explanation to introduce your model's details?

The design philosophy and technical details can be found [in my blog post](https://hanxiao.github.io/2019/01/02/Serving-Google-BERT-in-Production-using-Tensorflow-and-ZeroMQ/).

##### **Q:** Where is the BERT code come from?

**A:** [BERT code of this repo](server/bert_serving/server/bert/) is forked from the [original BERT repo](https://github.com/google-research/bert) with necessary modification, [especially in extract_features.py](server/bert_serving/server/bert/extract_features.py).

##### **Q:** How large is a sentence vector?
In general, each sentence is translated to a 768-dimensional vector. Depending on the pretrained BERT you are using, `pooling_strategy` and `pooling_layer` the dimensions of the output vector could be different. 

##### **Q:** How do you get the fixed representation? Did you do pooling or something?

**A:** Yes, pooling is required to get a fixed representation of a sentence. In the default strategy `REDUCE_MEAN`, I take the second-to-last hidden layer of all of the tokens in the sentence and do average pooling.

##### **Q:** Are you suggesting using BERT without fine-tuning?

**A:** Yes and no. On the one hand, Google pretrained BERT on Wikipedia data, thus should encode enough prior knowledge of the language into the model. Having such feature is not a bad idea. On the other hand, these prior knowledge is not specific to any particular domain. It should be totally reasonable if the performance is not ideal if you are using it on, for example, classifying legal cases. Nonetheless, you can always first fine-tune your own BERT on the downstream task and then use `bert-as-service` to extract the feature vectors efficiently. Keep in mind that `bert-as-service` is just a feature extraction service based on BERT. Nothing stops you from using a fine-tuned BERT.

##### **Q:** Can I get a concatenation of several layers instead of a single layer ?

**A:** Sure! Just use a list of the layer you want to concatenate when calling the server. Example:

```bash
bert-serving-start -pooling_layer -4 -3 -2 -1 -model_dir /tmp/english_L-12_H-768_A-12/
```

##### **Q:** What are the available pooling strategies?

**A:** Here is a table summarizes all pooling strategies I implemented. Choose your favorite one by specifying `bert-serving-start -pooling_strategy`.

|Strategy|Description|
|---|---|
| `NONE` | no pooling at all, useful when you want to use word embedding instead of sentence embedding. This will results in a `[max_seq_len, 768]` encode matrix for a sequence.|
| `REDUCE_MEAN` | take the average of the hidden state of encoding layer on the time axis |
| `REDUCE_MAX` | take the maximum of the hidden state of encoding layer on the time axis |
| `REDUCE_MEAN_MAX` | do `REDUCE_MEAN` and `REDUCE_MAX` separately and then concat them together on the last axis, resulting in 1536-dim sentence encodes |
| `CLS_TOKEN` or `FIRST_TOKEN` | get the hidden state corresponding to `[CLS]`, i.e. the first token |
| `SEP_TOKEN` or `LAST_TOKEN` | get the hidden state corresponding to `[SEP]`, i.e. the last token |

##### **Q:** Why not use the hidden state of the first token as default strategy, i.e. the `[CLS]`?

**A:** Because a pre-trained model is not fine-tuned on any downstream tasks yet. In this case, the hidden state of `[CLS]` is not a good sentence representation. If later you fine-tune the model, you may use `[CLS]` as well.

##### **Q:** BERT has 12/24 layers, so which layer are you talking about?

**A:** By default this service works on the second last layer, i.e. `pooling_layer=-2`. You can change it by setting `pooling_layer` to other negative values, e.g. -1 corresponds to the last layer.

##### **Q:** Why not the last hidden layer? Why second-to-last?

**A:** The last layer is too closed to the target functions (i.e. masked language model and next sentence prediction) during pre-training, therefore may be biased to those targets. If you question about this argument and want to use the last hidden layer anyway, please feel free to set `pooling_layer=-1`.

##### **Q:** So which layer and which pooling strategy is the best?

**A:** It depends. Keep in mind that different BERT layers capture different information. To see that more clearly, here is a visualization on [UCI-News Aggregator Dataset](https://www.kaggle.com/uciml/news-aggregator-dataset), where I randomly sample 20K news titles; get sentence encodes from different layers and with different pooling strategies, finally reduce it to 2D via PCA (one can of course do t-SNE as well, but that's not my point). There are only four classes of the data, illustrated in red, blue, yellow and green. To reproduce the result, please run [example7.py](example/example7.py).

<p align="center"><img src=".github/pool_mean.png?raw=true"></p>

<p align="center"><img src=".github/pool_max.png?raw=true"></p>

Intuitively, `pooling_layer=-1` is close to the training output, so it may be biased to the training targets. If you don't fine tune the model, then this could lead to a bad representation. `pooling_layer=-12` is close to the word embedding, may preserve the very original word information (with no fancy self-attention etc.). On the other hand, you may achieve the very same performance by simply using a word-embedding only. That said, anything in-between [-1, -12] is then a trade-off. 

##### **Q:** Could I use other pooling techniques?

**A:** For sure. But if you introduce new `tf.variables` to the graph, then you need to train those variables before using the model. You may also want to check [some pooling techniques I mentioned in my blog post](https://hanxiao.github.io/2018/06/24/4-Encoding-Blocks-You-Need-to-Know-Besides-LSTM-RNN-in-Tensorflow/#pooling-block).

##### **Q:** Do I need to batch the data before `encode()`?

No, not at all. Just do `encode` and let the server handles the rest. If the batch is too large, the server will do batching automatically and it is more efficient than doing it by yourself. No matter how many sentences you have, 10K or 100K, as long as you can hold it in client's memory, just send it to the server. Please also read [the benchmark on the client batch size](https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service#speed-wrt-client_batch_size).


##### **Q:** Can I start multiple clients and send requests to one server simultaneously?

**A:** Yes! That's the purpose of this repo. In fact you can start as many clients as you want. One server can handle all of them (given enough time).

##### **Q:** How many requests can one service handle concurrently?

**A:** The maximum number of concurrent requests is determined by `num_worker` in `bert-serving-start`. If you a sending more than `num_worker` requests concurrently, the new requests will be temporally stored in a queue until a free worker becomes available.

##### **Q:** So one request means one sentence?

**A:** No. One request means a list of sentences sent from a client. Think the size of a request as the batch size. A request may contain 256, 512 or 1024 sentences. The optimal size of a request is often determined empirically. One large request can certainly improve the GPU utilization, yet it also increases the overhead of transmission. You may run `python example/example1.py` for a simple benchmark.

##### **Q:** How about the speed? Is it fast enough for production?

**A:** It highly depends on the `max_seq_len` and the size of a request. On a single Tesla M40 24GB with `max_seq_len=40`, you should get about 470 samples per second using a 12-layer BERT. In general, I'd suggest smaller `max_seq_len` (25) and larger request size (512/1024).

##### **Q:** Did you benchmark the efficiency?

**A:** Yes. See [Benchmark](#zap-benchmark).

To reproduce the results, please run `bert-serving-benchmark`.

##### **Q:** What is backend based on?

**A:** [ZeroMQ](http://zeromq.org/).

##### **Q:** What is the parallel processing model behind the scene?

<img src=".github/bert-parallel-pipeline.png?raw=true" width="600">

##### **Q:** Why does the server need two ports?
One port is for pushing text data into the server, the other port is for publishing the encoded result to the client(s). In this way, we get rid of back-chatter, meaning that at every level recipients never talk back to senders. The overall message flow is strictly one-way, as depicted in the above figure. Killing back-chatter is essential to real scalability, allowing us to use `BertClient` in an asynchronous way. 

##### **Q:** Do I need Tensorflow on the client side?

**A:** No. Think of `BertClient` as a general feature extractor, whose output can be fed to *any* ML models, e.g. `scikit-learn`, `pytorch`, `tensorflow`. The only file that client need is [`client.py`](service/client.py). Copy this file to your project and import it, then you are ready to go.

##### **Q:** Can I use multilingual BERT model provided by Google?

**A:** Yes.

##### **Q:** Can I use my own fine-tuned BERT model?

**A:** Yes. In fact, this is suggested. Make sure you have the following three items in `model_dir`:

- A TensorFlow checkpoint (`bert_model.ckpt`) containing the pre-trained weights (which is actually 3 files).
- A vocab file (`vocab.txt`) to map WordPiece to word id.
- A config file (`bert_config.json`) which specifies the hyperparameters of the model.

##### **Q:** Can I run it in python 2?

**A:** Server side no, client side yes. This is based on the consideration that python 2.x might still be a major piece in some tech stack. Migrating the whole downstream stack to python 3 for supporting `bert-as-service` can take quite some effort. On the other hand, setting up `BertServer` is just a one-time thing, which can be even [run in a docker container](#run-bert-service-on-nvidia-docker). To ease the integration, we support python 2 on the client side so that you can directly use `BertClient` as a part of your python 2 project, whereas the server side should always be hosted with python 3.

##### **Q:** Do I need to do segmentation for Chinese?

No, if you are using [the pretrained Chinese BERT released by Google](https://github.com/google-research/bert#pre-trained-models) you don't need word segmentation. As this Chinese BERT is character-based model. It won't recognize word/phrase even if you intentionally add space in-between. To see that more clearly, this is what the BERT model actually receives after tokenization:

```python
bc.encode(['hey you', 'whats up?', '你好么？', '我 还 可以'])
```

```
tokens: [CLS] hey you [SEP]
input_ids: 101 13153 8357 102 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
input_mask: 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

tokens: [CLS] what ##s up ? [SEP]
input_ids: 101 9100 8118 8644 136 102 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
input_mask: 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

tokens: [CLS] 你 好 么 ？ [SEP]
input_ids: 101 872 1962 720 8043 102 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
input_mask: 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

tokens: [CLS] 我 还 可 以 [SEP]
input_ids: 101 2769 6820 1377 809 102 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
input_mask: 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
```

That means the word embedding is actually the character embedding for Chinese-BERT.


##### **Q:** Why my (English) word is tokenized to `##something`?

Because your word is out-of-vocabulary (OOV). The tokenizer from Google uses a greedy longest-match-first algorithm to perform tokenization using the given vocabulary.

For example:
```python
input = "unaffable"
tokenizer_output = ["un", "##aff", "##able"]
```

##### **Q:** Can I use my own tokenizer?

Yes. If you already tokenize the sentence on your own, simply send use `encode` with `List[List[Str]]` as input and turn on `is_tokenized`, i.e. `bc.encode(texts, is_tokenized=True)`.


##### **Q:** I encounter `zmq.error.ZMQError: Operation cannot be accomplished in current state` when using `BertClient`, what should I do?

**A:** This is often due to the misuse of `BertClient` in multi-thread/process environment. Note that you can’t reuse one `BertClient` among multiple threads/processes, you have to make a separate instance for each thread/process. For example, the following won't work at all:

```python
# BAD example
bc = BertClient()

# in Proc1/Thread1 scope:
bc.encode(lst_str)

# in Proc2/Thread2 scope:
bc.encode(lst_str)
```

Instead, please do:

```python
# in Proc1/Thread1 scope:
bc1 = BertClient()
bc1.encode(lst_str)

# in Proc2/Thread2 scope:
bc2 = BertClient()
bc2.encode(lst_str)
```

##### **Q:** After running the server, I have several garbage `tmpXXXX` folders. How can I change this behavior ?

**A:** These folders are used by ZeroMQ to store sockets. You can choose a different location by setting the environment variable `ZEROMQ_SOCK_TMP_DIR` :
`export ZEROMQ_SOCK_TMP_DIR=/tmp/`

##### **Q:** The cosine similarity of two sentence vectors is unreasonably high (e.g. always > 0.8), what's wrong?

**A:** A decent representation for a downstream task doesn't mean that it will be meaningful in terms of cosine distance. Since cosine distance is a linear space where all dimensions are weighted equally. if you want to use cosine distance anyway, then please focus on the rank not the absolute value. Namely, do not use:
```
if cosine(A, B) > 0.9, then A and B are similar
```
Please consider the following instead:
```
if cosine(A, B) > cosine(A, C), then A is more similar to B than C.
```

The graph below illustrates the pairwise similarity of 3000 Chinese sentences randomly sampled from web (char. length < 25). We compute cosine similarity based on the sentence vectors and [Rouge-L](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROUGE_(metric)) based on the raw text. The diagonal (self-correlation) is removed for the sake of clarity. As one can see, there is some positive correlation between these two metrics.

<p align="center"><img src=".github/cosine-vs-rougel.png?raw=true"/></p>   


##### **Q:** I'm getting bad performance, what should I do?

**A:** This often suggests that the pretrained BERT could not generate a descent representation of your downstream task. Thus, you can fine-tune the model on the downstream task and then use `bert-as-service` to serve the fine-tuned BERT. Note that, `bert-as-service` is just a feature extraction service based on BERT. Nothing stops you from using a fine-tuned BERT.

##### **Q:** Can I run the server side on CPU-only machine?

**A:** Yes, please run `bert-serving-start -cpu -max_batch_size 16`. Note that, CPU does not scale as good as GPU on large batches, therefore the `max_batch_size` on the server side needs to be smaller, e.g. 16 or 32.

##### **Q:** How can I choose `num_worker`?

**A:** Generally, the number of workers should be less than or equal to the number of GPU/CPU you have. Otherwise, multiple workers will be allocated to one GPU/CPU, which may not scale well (and may cause out-of-memory on GPU).

##### **Q:** Can I specify which GPU to use?

**A:** Yes, you can specifying `-device_map` as follows:
```bash
bert-serving-start -device_map 0 1 4 -num_worker 4 -model_dir ...
```
This will start four workers and allocate them to GPU0, GPU1, GPU4 and again GPU0, respectively. In general, if `num_worker` > `device_map`, then devices will be reused and shared by the workers (may scale suboptimally or cause OOM); if `num_worker` < `device_map`, only `device_map[:num_worker]` will be used.

Note, `device_map` is ignored when running on CPU.

<h2 align="center">:zap: Benchmark</h2>
<p align="right"><a href="#bert-as-service"><sup>▴ Back to top</sup></a></p>

[![ReadTheDoc](https://readthedocs.org/projects/bert-as-service/badge/?version=latest&style=for-the-badge)](https://bert-as-service.readthedocs.io/en/latest/section/benchmark.html)

The primary goal of benchmarking is to test the scalability and the speed of this service, which is crucial for using it in a dev/prod environment. Benchmark was done on Tesla M40 24GB, experiments were repeated 10 times and the average value is reported.

To reproduce the results, please run
```bash
bert-serving-benchmark --help
```

Common arguments across all experiments are:

| Parameter         | Value |
|-------------------|-------|
| num_worker        | 1,2,4 |
| max_seq_len       | 40    |
| client_batch_size | 2048  |
| max_batch_size    | 256   |
| num_client        | 1     |

#### Speed wrt. `max_seq_len`

`max_seq_len` is a parameter on the server side, which controls the maximum length of a sequence that a BERT model can handle. Sequences larger than `max_seq_len` will be truncated on the left side. Thus, if your client want to send long sequences to the model, please make sure the server can handle them correctly.

Performance-wise, longer sequences means slower speed and  more chance of OOM, as the multi-head self-attention (the core unit of BERT) needs to do dot products and matrix multiplications between every two symbols in the sequence.

<img src=".github/max_seq_len.png?raw=true" width="600">

| `max_seq_len` | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 4 GPU |
|---------------|-------|-------|-------|
| 20            | 903   | 1774  | 3254  |
| 40            | 473   | 919   | 1687  |
| 80            | 231   | 435   | 768   |
| 160           | 119   | 237   | 464   |
| 320           | 54    | 108   | 212   |

#### Speed wrt. `client_batch_size`

`client_batch_size` is the number of sequences from a client when invoking `encode()`. For performance reason, please consider encoding sequences in batch rather than encoding them one by one. 

For example, do:
```python
# prepare your sent in advance
bc = BertClient()
my_sentences = [s for s in my_corpus.iter()]
# doing encoding in one-shot
vec = bc.encode(my_sentences)
```

DON'T:
```python
bc = BertClient()
vec = []
for s in my_corpus.iter():
    vec.append(bc.encode(s))
```

It's even worse if you put `BertClient()` inside the loop. Don't do that.

<img src=".github/client_batch_size.png?raw=true" width="600">

| `client_batch_size` | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 4 GPU |
|---------------------|-------|-------|-------|
| 1                   | 75    | 74    | 72    |
| 4                   | 206   | 205   | 201   |
| 8                   | 274   | 270   | 267   |
| 16                  | 332   | 329   | 330   |
| 64                  | 365   | 365   | 365   |
| 256                 | 382   | 383   | 383   |
| 512                 | 432   | 766   | 762   |
| 1024                | 459   | 862   | 1517  |
| 2048                | 473   | 917   | 1681  |
| 4096                | 481   | 943   | 1809  |



#### Speed wrt. `num_client`
`num_client` represents the number of concurrent clients connected to the server at the same time.

<img src=".github/num_clients.png?raw=true" width="600">

| `num_client` | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 4 GPU |
|--------------|-------|-------|-------|
| 1            | 473   | 919   | 1759  |
| 2            | 261   | 512   | 1028  |
| 4            | 133   | 267   | 533   |
| 8            | 67    | 136   | 270   |
| 16           | 34    | 68    | 136   |
| 32           | 17    | 34    | 68    |

As one can observe, 1 clients 1 GPU = 381 seqs/s, 2 clients 2 GPU 402 seqs/s, 4 clients 4 GPU 413 seqs/s. This shows the efficiency of our parallel pipeline and job scheduling, as the service can leverage the GPU time  more exhaustively as concurrent requests increase.


#### Speed wrt. `max_batch_size`

`max_batch_size` is a parameter on the server side, which controls the maximum number of samples per batch per worker. If a incoming batch from client is larger than `max_batch_size`, the server will split it into small batches so that each of them is less or equal than `max_batch_size` before sending it to workers.

<img src=".github/max_batch_size.png?raw=true" width="600">

| `max_batch_size` | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 4 GPU |
|------------------|-------|-------|-------|
| 32               | 450   | 887   | 1726  |
| 64               | 459   | 897   | 1759  |
| 128              | 473   | 931   | 1816  |
| 256              | 473   | 919   | 1688  |
| 512              | 464   | 866   | 1483  |


#### Speed wrt. `pooling_layer`

`pooling_layer` determines the encoding layer that pooling operates on. For example, in a 12-layer BERT model, `-1` represents the layer closed to the output, `-12` represents the layer closed to the embedding layer. As one can observe below, the depth of the pooling layer affects the speed.

<img src=".github/pooling_layer.png?raw=true" width="600">

| `pooling_layer` | 1 GPU | 2 GPU | 4 GPU |
|-----------------|-------|-------|-------|
| [-1]            | 438   | 844   | 1568  |
| [-2]            | 475   | 916   | 1686  |
| [-3]            | 516   | 995   | 1823  |
| [-4]            | 569   | 1076  | 1986  |
| [-5]            | 633   | 1193  | 2184  |
| [-6]            | 711   | 1340  | 2430  |
| [-7]            | 820   | 1528  | 2729  |
| [-8]            | 945   | 1772  | 3104  |
| [-9]            | 1128  | 2047  | 3622  |
| [-10]           | 1392  | 2542  | 4241  |
| [-11]           | 1523  | 2737  | 4752  |
| [-12]           | 1568  | 2985  | 5303  |


#### Speed wrt. `-fp16` and `-xla`

`bert-as-service` supports two additional optimizations: half-precision and XLA, which can be turned on by adding `-fp16` and `-xla` to `bert-serving-start`, respectively. To enable these two options, you have to meet the following requirements:

- your GPU supports FP16 instructions;
- your Tensorflow is self-compiled with XLA and `-march=native`;
- your CUDA and cudnn are not too old.

On Tesla V100 with `tensorflow=1.13.0-rc0` it gives:

<img src=".github/fp16-xla.svg" width="600">

FP16 achieves ~1.4x speedup (round-trip) comparing to the FP32 counterpart. To reproduce the result, please run `python example/example1.py`.


<h2 align="center">Citing</h2>
<p align="right"><a href="#bert-as-service"><sup>▴ Back to top</sup></a></p>

If you use bert-as-service in a scientific publication, we would appreciate references to the following BibTex entry:

```latex
@misc{xiao2018bertservice,
  title={bert-as-service},
  author={Xiao, Han},
  howpublished={\url{https://github.com/hanxiao/bert-as-service}},
  year={2018}
}
```