Quickstart

This quickstart is intended for developers who are ready to dive into the code and see an example of how to train and use 🤗 SetFit models. We recommend starting with this quickstart, and then proceeding to the tutorials or how-to guides for additional material. Additionally, the conceptual guides help explain exactly how SetFit works.

Start by installing 🤗 SetFit:

pip install setfit

If you have a CUDA-capable graphics card, then it is recommended to install torch with CUDA support to train and performing inference much more quickly:

pip install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu118

SetFit

SetFit is an efficient framework to train low-latency text classification models using little training data. In this Quickstart, you’ll learn how to train a SetFit model, how to perform inference with it, and how to save it to the Hugging Face Hub.

Training

In this section, you’ll load a Sentence Transformer model and further finetune it for classifying movie reviews as positive or negative. To train a model, we will need to prepare the following three: 1) a model, 2) a dataset, and 3) training arguments.

1. Initialize a SetFit model using a Sentence Transformer model of our choice. Consider using the MTEB Leaderboard to guide your decision on which Sentence Transformer model to choose. We will use BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5, a small but performant model.

>>> from setfit import SetFitModel

>>> model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5")

2a. Next, load both the “train” and “test” splits of the SetFit/sst2 dataset. Note that the dataset has "text" and "label" columns: this is exactly the format that 🤗 SetFit expects. If your dataset has different columns, then you can use the column_mapping argument of the Trainer in step 4 to map the column names to "text" and "label".

>>> from datasets import load_dataset

>>> dataset = load_dataset("SetFit/sst2")
>>> dataset
DatasetDict({
    train: Dataset({
        features: ['text', 'label', 'label_text'],
        num_rows: 6920
    })
    test: Dataset({
        features: ['text', 'label', 'label_text'],
        num_rows: 1821
    })
    validation: Dataset({
        features: ['text', 'label', 'label_text'],
        num_rows: 872
    })
})

2b. In real world scenarios it is very uncommon to have ~7.000 high quality labeled training samples, so we will heavily shrink the training dataset to give a better idea of how 🤗 SetFit would work in real settings. To be specific, the sample_dataset function will sample only 8 samples for each class. The testing set is left unaffected for better evaluation.

>>> from setfit import sample_dataset

>>> train_dataset = sample_dataset(dataset["train"], label_column="label", num_samples=8)
>>> train_dataset
Dataset({
    features: ['text', 'label', 'label_text'],
    num_rows: 16
})

>>> test_dataset = dataset["test"]
>>> test_dataset
Dataset({
    features: ['text', 'label', 'label_text'],
    num_rows: 1821
})

2c. We can apply the labels from the dataset on the model, so the predictions output readable classes. You can also provide the labels directly to SetFitModel.from_pretrained().

>>> model.labels = ["negative", "positive"]

3. Prepare the TrainingArguments for training. Note that training with 🤗 SetFit consists of two phases behind the scenes: finetuning embeddings and training a classification head. As a result, some of the training arguments can be tuples, where the two values are used for each of the two phases, respectively.

The num_epochs and max_steps arguments are frequently used to increase and decrease the number of total training steps. Consider that with SetFit, better performance is reached with more data, not more training! Don’t be afraid to train for less than 1 epoch if you have a lot of data.

>>> from setfit import TrainingArguments

>>> args = TrainingArguments(
...     batch_size=32,
...     num_epochs=10,
... )

4. Initialize the Trainer and perform training.

>>> from setfit import Trainer

>>> trainer = Trainer(
...     model=model,
...     args=args,
...     train_dataset=train_dataset,
... )

>>> trainer.train()
***** Running training *****
  Num examples = 5
  Num epochs = 10
  Total optimization steps = 50
  Total train batch size = 32
{'embedding_loss': 0.2077, 'learning_rate': 4.000000000000001e-06, 'epoch': 0.2}                                                                                                                
{'embedding_loss': 0.0097, 'learning_rate': 0.0, 'epoch': 10.0}                                                                                                                                 
{'train_runtime': 14.705, 'train_samples_per_second': 108.807, 'train_steps_per_second': 3.4, 'epoch': 10.0}
100%|██████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████| 50/50 [00:08<00:00,  5.70it/s]

5. Perform evaluation using the provided testing dataset.

>>> trainer.evaluate(test_dataset)
***** Running evaluation *****
{'accuracy': 0.8511806699615596}

Feel free to experiment with increasing the number of samples per class to observe the improvements in accuracy. As a challenge, you can play with the samples per class, learning rate, number of epochs, maximum number of steps, and the base Sentence Transformer model to try and improve the accuracy over 90% using very little data.

Saving a 🤗 SetFit model

After training, you can save a 🤗 SetFit model to your local filesystem or to the Hugging Face Hub. Save a model to a local directory using SetFitModel.save_pretrained() by providing a save_directory:

>>> model.save_pretrained("setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot")

Alternatively, push a model to the Hugging Face Hub using SetFitModel.push_to_hub() by providing a repo_id:

>>> model.push_to_hub("tomaarsen/setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot")

Loading a 🤗 SetFit model

A 🤗 SetFit model can be loaded using SetFitModel.from_pretrained() by providing 1) a repo_id from the Hugging Face Hub or 2) a path to a local directory:

>>> model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("tomaarsen/setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot") # Load from the Hugging Face Hub

>>> model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot") # Load from a local directory

Inference

Once a 🤗 SetFit model has been trained, then it can be used for inference to classify reviews using SetFitModel.predict() or SetFitModel.call():

>>> preds = model.predict([
...     "It's a charming and often affecting journey.",
...     "It's slow -- very, very slow.",
...     "A sometimes tedious film.",
... ])
>>> preds
['positive' 'negative' 'negative']

These predictions rely on the model.labels. If not set, it will return predictions in the format that was used during training, e.g. tensor([1, 0, 0]).

What’s next?

You’ve completed the 🤗 SetFit quickstart! You can train, save, load and perform inference with 🤗 SetFit models!

For your next steps, take a look at our How-to guides and learn how to do more specific things like hyperparameter search, knowledge distillation, or zero-shot text classification. If you’re interested in learning more about how 🤗 SetFit works, grab a cup of coffee and read our Conceptual Guides!

End-to-end

This snippet shows the entire quickstart in an end-to-end example:

from setfit import SetFitModel, Trainer, TrainingArguments, sample_dataset
from datasets import load_dataset

# Initializing a new SetFit model
model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("BAAI/bge-small-en-v1.5", labels=["negative", "positive"])

# Preparing the dataset
dataset = load_dataset("SetFit/sst2")
train_dataset = sample_dataset(dataset["train"], label_column="label", num_samples=8)
test_dataset = dataset["test"]

# Preparing the training arguments
args = TrainingArguments(
    batch_size=32,
    num_epochs=10,
)

# Preparing the trainer
trainer = Trainer(
    model=model,
    args=args,
    train_dataset=train_dataset,
)
trainer.train()

# Evaluating
metrics = trainer.evaluate(test_dataset)
print(metrics)
# => {'accuracy': 0.8511806699615596}

# Saving the trained model
model.save_pretrained("setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot")
# or
model.push_to_hub("tomaarsen/setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot")

# Loading a trained model
model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("tomaarsen/setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot") # Load from the Hugging Face Hub
# or
model = SetFitModel.from_pretrained("setfit-bge-small-v1.5-sst2-8-shot") # Load from a local directory

# Performing inference
preds = model.predict([
    "It's a charming and often affecting journey.",
    "It's slow -- very, very slow.",
    "A sometimes tedious film.",
])
print(preds)
# => ["positive", "negative", "negative"]

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