The Causal Decoder-Only Falcon and Its Alternatives
Tags: llm, falcon
Published: 2024-07-16 10:57:47

## Key Highlights

- **Cutting-Edge Technology:** Falcon-40B-Instruct is a 40 billion parameter causal decoder-only model, leading in performance and innovation in natural language processing.
- **Multilingual Support:** Supports primary languages including English, with extended capabilities in German, Spanish, French, and limited support for other European languages.
- **Alternatives:** Explore competitive models like Meta-Llama-3–70B-Instruct and Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral 8x7B DPO, each offering unique strengths and applications.
- **Innovative Features: **Introduces Self-Distillation with Feedback (SDF) for model refinement and customizable inference prompts, enhancing adaptability and user interaction.

## Introduction
Welcome to our exploration of Falcon-40B-Instruct and its alternatives in the landscape of LLMs. In this article, we will delve into the intricacies of Falcon-40B-Instruct, examining its technical foundations, linguistic support, and innovations like Self-Distillation with Feedback (SDF). We'll also explore setting up code and practical applications for developers. Additionally, we'll discuss alternatives to Falcon-40B-Instruct, highlighting competitive models in the current LLM landscape.

## Overview of Falcon-40B-Instruct
Falcon-40B-Instruct is a 40 billion parameter causal decoder-only language model developed by the Technology Innovation Institute (TII). It is based on the Falcon-40B model and has been fine-tuned on a mixture of data, including the Baize dataset, to create an instruct-following model.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/iyerjzby24kh7s4gtz0a.png)

## Exploring Details of Falcon-40B-Instruct
In this section, we will dive deeper into the details of Falcon-40B-Instruct. In this way, you can better understand and leverage the power of it.

### Linguistic Support

- Primary Languages: English, leveraging the robust dataset from RefinedWeb and curated corpora
- Extended Support: German, Spanish, French, with limited capabilities in Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, Romanian, Czech, and Swedish, showcasing Falcon-40B-Instruct's versatility in understanding and generating responses in multiple European languages.

### Technical Foundation - Falcon-40B

- Performance: Leading in the OpenLLM Leaderboard, surpassing models like LLaMA, StableLM, RedPajama, and MPT.
- Optimization: Advanced inference optimization with FlashAttention and multiquery, ensuring efficient text generation.

### Enhancement through Baize

- Baize Integration: Fine-tuned using Baize's high-quality, multi-turn dialogues, enhancing conversational capabilities.
- Parameter-Efficient Tuning: Utilizes LoRA for efficient adaptation, making the most of limited computational resources.

### Innovations and Techniques

- Self-Distillation with Feedback (SDF): A novel technique that refines the model based on ChatGPT's rankings of generated responses.
- Inference Prompt: Customizable prompts for focused and ethically constrained dialogues.

### Legal and Licensing Information

- License: Apache 2.0, promoting open and unrestricted use for compliant projects.
- Research-Only Use: The Baize models and data are intended solely for research to foster responsible AI development.

### Performance
While developers on Huggingface claim Falcon-40B is the best open-source model, surpassing LLaMA, StableLM, RedPajama, MPT, and others, the Falcon model series does not perform as strongly as models like LLaMA-3–70B-Instruct according to the Huggingface Open LLM Leaderboard.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ieebdeodgojs1pqziu17.png)

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/1qkn2enf78h8ouahhkft.png)

## What Is a Causal Decoder-Only LLM?
A causal decoder-only model is a type of artificial intelligence system designed to process and generate sequences of data, most commonly used for natural language tasks. Unlike traditional encoder-decoder models, this model focuses solely on the decoder component, which is responsible for output generation.

### Functionality

- Input Handling: The model takes an input sequence, such as a sentence or a series of words, and uses that as a prompt for generating a response. It doesn't have an encoder, so it doesn't convert input into a hidden representation; instead, it works directly with the input tokens.
- Tokenization: The input is broken down into tokens, which could be words, characters, or sub-word units, depending on the model's training and the language it's designed for.

### Generation Process

- Initialization: The model starts with an initial internal state, often a vector of numbers that represents the starting point for generating the output.
- Positional Encoding: To understand the order of tokens, the model uses positional encoding to know the position of each token in the sequence.
- Autoregressive Generation: The model generates output token by token, using what it has generated so far to inform its next step. This respects the sequence's order and is why it's called "causal" - it can only depend on past tokens, not future ones.

### Internal Mechanisms

- Self-Attention: The model uses self-attention to determine which parts of the input sequence are relevant for predicting the next token. This mechanism allows it to focus on the right context at each step.
- Feed-Forward Networks: After the self-attention mechanism processes the input, feed-forward neural networks help the model decide the exact output for each token.
- Recursive Prediction: The model predicts and appends one token at a time, using the growing sequence as context for the next prediction, until it reaches a stopping criterion, like a period or a special end token.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/07bfi4x6ejupup3b2xhe.png)

## What Are the Practical Applications of Falcon-40B-Instruct for Developers?

### Chatbots and Virtual Assistants
Developers can use Falcon-40B-Instruct to create chatbots and virtual assistants that can engage in multi-turn conversations, providing interactive and contextually relevant responses to user queries.

### Content Creation
The model can be utilized to generate creative content such as stories, articles, or social media posts, assisting developers in creating dynamic and engaging digital content with less human effort.

### Language Translation
Although primarily trained on European languages, the model's understanding of language structure can be applied to develop or improve translation services between supported languages.

### Text Summarization
Falcon-40B-Instruct can read large volumes of text and generate concise summaries, which is useful for applications like news aggregation or generating executive summaries for long documents.

### Automated Reporting
By processing data and generating natural language descriptions, the model can assist in creating automated reports for various domains such as finance, research, or project management.

### Code Generation and Assistance
Developers can leverage the model to generate code snippets or provide coding suggestions, improving development efficiency and aiding in solving programming problems.

### Data Annotation
Falcon-40B-Instruct can be used to automatically annotate data with descriptive labels, aiding in the preparation of datasets for machine learning projects.

## How to Get Started With Falcon-40B-Instruct?
To get started with Falcon-40B-Instruct using the provided code snippet at the end of this section, follow these steps to prepare your environment and execute the code:

### Step 1: Environment Setup
- Ensure you have Python installed on your system. Python 3.6 or higher is recommended.
- Install a virtual environment manager like `venv` or `conda` to create an isolated Python environment for the project.

### Step 2: Install Dependencies
- Activate your virtual environment.
- Install the `transformers` library from Hugging Face, which provides the necessary tools to work with the Falcon-40B-Instruct model. Use `pip install transformers`
- Install `torch`, the PyTorch library, which is required for model inference. You can install it via `pip install torch torchvision torchaudio`

### Step 3: Download and Import Model
The code snippet provided uses the `AutoTokenizer` and `AutoModelForCausalLMclasses` from the `transformers` library to download and cache the Falcon-40B-Instruct model and its associated tokenizer.

### Step 4: Prepare the Code
Copy the provided code snippet into a Python script or a Jupyter notebook cell.

### Step 5: Configure Hardware Acceleration
The `device_map="auto"` argument in the pipeline configuration allows the code to run on the GPU if one is available, otherwise it will use the CPU.

### Step 6: Run the Code
Execute the script or the notebook cell. This will load the model and tokenizer, and then use the pipeline to generate text.

### Step 7: Interact with the Model
The code defines a prompt for the model to continue the fictional conversation between Daniel and Girafatron. The model generates a response based on this prompt.

### Step 8: Customize Parameters
You can adjust the generation parameters such as `max_length`, `do_sample`, `top_k`, and `num_return_sequences` to control the behavior of the generated text.

### Step 9: Review Output
The generated text is stored in the sequences variable, and the code prints the generated_text from each sequence in the variable.

### Step 10: Experiment and Iterate
Use the model for different prompts or tasks, and adjust the pipeline settings to achieve the desired results.

### Step 11: Check for Errors
If there are any errors during execution, they may be related to package installation, model download, or incorrect code. Ensure all packages are installed correctly and that your environment meets the system requirements.

### Step 12: Ethical Considerations
Be mindful of the ethical implications of the generated content, especially regarding bias, misinformation, and appropriate use cases.

```
from transformers import AutoTokenizer, AutoModelForCausalLM
import transformers
import torch

model = "tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct"

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model)
pipeline = transformers.pipeline(
    "text-generation",
    model=model,
    tokenizer=tokenizer,
    torch_dtype=torch.bfloat16,
    trust_remote_code=True,
    device_map="auto",
)
sequences = pipeline(
   "Girafatron is obsessed with giraffes, the most glorious animal on the face of this Earth. Giraftron believes all other animals are irrelevant when compared to the glorious majesty of the giraffe.\nDaniel: Hello, Girafatron!\nGirafatron:",
    max_length=200,
    do_sample=True,
    top_k=10,
    num_return_sequences=1,
    eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
)
for seq in sequences:
    print(f"Result: {seq['generated_text']}")

@article{falcon40b,
  title={{Falcon-40B}: an open large language model with state-of-the-art performance},
  author={Almazrouei, Ebtesam and Alobeidli, Hamza and Alshamsi, Abdulaziz and Cappelli, Alessandro and Cojocaru, Ruxandra and Debbah, Merouane and Goffinet, Etienne and Heslow, Daniel and Launay, Julien and Malartic, Quentin and Noune, Badreddine and Pannier, Baptiste and Penedo, Guilherme},
  year={2023}
}
```
For more information about setting up the model, you can visit tiiuae/falcon-40b-instruct on Huggingface.

## What Are the Limitations of a Causal Decoder-Only LLM?

### Single-Directional Context
These models can only use information from previous tokens to predict the next one, which might limit their ability to handle complex, nested, or long-range dependencies compared to bidirectional models.

### Inability to Access Future Context
Since causal models are constrained by the auto-regressive nature, they cannot take future context into account, which can be a disadvantage for certain tasks that might benefit from looking ahead.

### Training Data Dependency
The quality and diversity of the training data significantly impact the model's performance. If the training data is biased or not representative, the model's outputs will reflect these issues.

### Computational Efficiency
Causal decoder-only models generate text token by token, which can be computationally less efficient compared to batch processing or parallel processing capabilities of non-autoregressive models.

### Limited Understanding of Context
While these models can generate coherent text, their understanding of context is based on patterns in the training data rather than human-like comprehension.

## What Are the Alternatives to Falcon-40B-Instruct?
According to [Open LLM Leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/open-llm-leaderboard/open_llm_leaderboard) on Huggingface, there are many LLMs that score higher than Falcon-40B-Instruct on popular benchmarks. As a result, they serve as strong alternatives to causal decoder-only Falcon. 

### Meta-Llama-3–70B-Instruct on Novita AI

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/6vzj1xpuhz6w3yhl94zh.png)

Meta's latest class of model (Llama 3) launched with a variety of sizes & flavors. This [**70B instruct-tuned version**](https://novita.ai/llm-api/playground#meta-llama-llama-3-70b-instruct) was optimized for high quality dialogue usecases. It has demonstrated strong performance compared to leading closed-source models in human evaluations.

### Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral 8x7B DPO on Novita AI

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/7v67bbmetohqkzqkdbdi.png)

[**Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral 8x7B DPO**](https://novita.ai/llm-api/playground#Nous-Hermes-2-Mixtral-8x7B-DPO) is the new flagship Nous Research model trained over the Mixtral 8x7B MoE LLM. The model was trained on over 1,000,000 entries of primarily GPT-4 generated data, as well as other high quality data from open datasets across the AI landscape, achieving state of the art performance on a variety of tasks.

### teknium/openhermes-2.5-mistral-7b on Novita AI

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/4f8hicmtanz1jms6qljg.png)

[**OpenHermes 2.5 Mistral 7B**](https://novita.ai/llm-api/playground#teknium-openhermes-2.5-mistral-7b) is a state of the art Mistral Fine-tune, a continuation of OpenHermes 2 model, which trained on additional code datasets.

Provided by Novita AI, these LLM APIs offer adjustable hyperparameters and system prompt inputs tailored to your personal needs.

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/51bcrg3d6ywkb6l4n7o1.png)

## Conclusion
As we conclude our exploration of Falcon-40B-Instruct and its alternatives, it's clear that the field of large language models continues to evolve rapidly. Falcon-40B-Instruct, with its causal decoder-only design and advanced capabilities in text generation and inference, offers developers a powerful tool for a wide range of applications from chatbots to automated reporting.

While Falcon-40B-Instruct demonstrates robust performance and versatility, alternative models such as Meta-Llama-3–70B-Instruct and Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral 8x7B DPO also present compelling options with their own unique strengths and benchmarks. Whether you choose Falcon-40B-Instruct or one of its alternatives depends on your specific use case, computational resources, and desired performance metrics.

## FAQs

### 1. What are the requirements for Falcon-40B compute?
Falcon-40B requires ~90GB of GPU memory.

> Originally published at [Novita AI](https://blogs.novita.ai/the-causal-decoder-only-falcon-and-its-alternatives/?utm_source=dev_llm&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=falcon)

> [Novita AI](https://novita.ai/?utm_source=dev_LLM&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=the-causal-decoder-only-falcon-and-its-alternatives) is the all-in-one cloud platform that empowers your AI ambitions. With seamlessly integrated APIs, serverless computing, and GPU acceleration, we provide the cost-effective tools you need to rapidly build and scale your AI-driven business. Eliminate infrastructure headaches and get started for free - Novita AI makes your AI dreams a reality.