TRL documentation

Best of N sampling: Alternative ways to get better model output without RL based fine-tuning

You are viewing main version, which requires installation from source. If you'd like regular pip install, checkout the latest stable version (v0.8.6).
Hugging Face's logo
Join the Hugging Face community

and get access to the augmented documentation experience

to get started

Best of N sampling: Alternative ways to get better model output without RL based fine-tuning

Within the extras module is the best-of-n sampler class that serves as an alternative method of generating better model output. As to how it fares against the RL based fine-tuning, please look in the examples directory for a comparison example

Usage

To get started quickly, instantiate an instance of the class with a model, a length sampler, a tokenizer and a callable that serves as a proxy reward pipeline that outputs reward scores for input queries


from transformers import pipeline, AutoTokenizer
from trl import AutoModelForCausalLMWithValueHead
from trl.core import LengthSampler
from trl.extras import BestOfNSampler

ref_model = AutoModelForCausalLMWithValueHead.from_pretrained(ref_model_name)
reward_pipe = pipeline("sentiment-analysis", model=reward_model, device=device)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(ref_model_name)
tokenizer.pad_token = tokenizer.eos_token


# callable that takes a list of raw text and returns a list of corresponding reward scores
def queries_to_scores(list_of_strings):
  return [output["score"] for output in reward_pipe(list_of_strings)]

best_of_n = BestOfNSampler(model, tokenizer, queries_to_scores, length_sampler=output_length_sampler)

And assuming you have a list/tensor of tokenized queries, you can generate better output by calling the generate method


best_of_n.generate(query_tensors, device=device, **gen_kwargs)

The default sample size is 4, but you can change it at the time of instance initialization like so


best_of_n = BestOfNSampler(model, tokenizer, queries_to_scores, length_sampler=output_length_sampler, sample_size=8)

The default output is the result of taking the top scored output for each query, but you can change it to top 2 and so on by passing the n_candidates argument at the time of instance initialization


best_of_n = BestOfNSampler(model, tokenizer, queries_to_scores, length_sampler=output_length_sampler, n_candidates=2)

There is the option of setting the generation settings (like temperature, pad_token_id) at the time of instance creation as opposed to when calling the generate method. This is done by passing a GenerationConfig from the transformers library at the time of initialization


from transformers import GenerationConfig

generation_config = GenerationConfig(min_length= -1, top_k=0.0, top_p= 1.0, do_sample= True, pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id)

best_of_n = BestOfNSampler(model, tokenizer, queries_to_scores, length_sampler=output_length_sampler, generation_config=generation_config)

best_of_n.generate(query_tensors, device=device)

Furthermore, at the time of initialization you can set the seed to control repeatability of the generation process and the number of samples to generate for each query

< > Update on GitHub