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Philosophy
🤗 Transformers is an opinionated library built for:
- NLP researchers and educators seeking to use/study/extend large-scale transformers models
- hands-on practitioners who want to fine-tune those models and/or serve them in production
- engineers who just want to download a pretrained model and use it to solve a given NLP task.
The library was designed with two strong goals in mind:
Be as easy and fast to use as possible:
- We strongly limited the number of user-facing abstractions to learn, in fact, there are almost no abstractions, just three standard classes required to use each model: configuration, models and tokenizer.
- All of these classes can be initialized in a simple and unified way from pretrained instances by using a common
from_pretrained()
instantiation method which will take care of downloading (if needed), caching and loading the related class instance and associated data (configurations’ hyper-parameters, tokenizers’ vocabulary, and models’ weights) from a pretrained checkpoint provided on Hugging Face Hub or your own saved checkpoint. - On top of those three base classes, the library provides two APIs: pipeline() for quickly
using a model (plus its associated tokenizer and configuration) on a given task and
Trainer/
Keras.fit
to quickly train or fine-tune a given model. - As a consequence, this library is NOT a modular toolbox of building blocks for neural nets. If you want to extend/build-upon the library, just use regular Python/PyTorch/TensorFlow/Keras modules and inherit from the base classes of the library to reuse functionalities like model loading/saving.
Provide state-of-the-art models with performances as close as possible to the original models:
- We provide at least one example for each architecture which reproduces a result provided by the official authors of said architecture.
- The code is usually as close to the original code base as possible which means some PyTorch code may be not as pytorchic as it could be as a result of being converted TensorFlow code and vice versa.
A few other goals:
Expose the models’ internals as consistently as possible:
- We give access, using a single API, to the full hidden-states and attention weights.
- Tokenizer and base model’s API are standardized to easily switch between models.
Incorporate a subjective selection of promising tools for fine-tuning/investigating these models:
- A simple/consistent way to add new tokens to the vocabulary and embeddings for fine-tuning.
- Simple ways to mask and prune transformer heads.
Switch easily between PyTorch and TensorFlow 2.0, allowing training using one framework and inference using another.
Main concepts
The library is built around three types of classes for each model:
- Model classes such as BertModel, which are 30+ PyTorch models (torch.nn.Module) or Keras models (tf.keras.Model) that work with the pretrained weights provided in the library.
- Configuration classes such as BertConfig, which store all the parameters required to build a model. You don’t always need to instantiate these yourself. In particular, if you are using a pretrained model without any modification, creating the model will automatically take care of instantiating the configuration (which is part of the model).
- Tokenizer classes such as BertTokenizer, which store the vocabulary for each model and provide methods for encoding/decoding strings in a list of token embeddings indices to be fed to a model.
All these classes can be instantiated from pretrained instances and saved locally using two methods:
from_pretrained()
lets you instantiate a model/configuration/tokenizer from a pretrained version either provided by the library itself (the supported models can be found on the Model Hub) or stored locally (or on a server) by the user,save_pretrained()
lets you save a model/configuration/tokenizer locally so that it can be reloaded usingfrom_pretrained()
.