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language: |
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- multilingual |
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- af |
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- am |
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- ar |
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- az |
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- be |
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- bg |
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- bn |
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- ca |
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- ceb |
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- co |
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- cs |
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- cy |
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- da |
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- de |
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- el |
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- en |
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- eo |
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- es |
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- et |
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- eu |
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- fa |
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- fi |
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- fil |
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- fr |
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- fy |
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- ga |
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- gd |
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- gl |
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- gu |
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- ha |
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- haw |
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- hi |
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- hmn |
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- ht |
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- hu |
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- hy |
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- ig |
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- is |
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- it |
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- iw |
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- ja |
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- jv |
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- ka |
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- kk |
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- km |
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- kn |
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- ko |
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- ku |
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- ky |
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- la |
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- lb |
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- lo |
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- lt |
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- lv |
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- mg |
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- mi |
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- mk |
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- ml |
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- mn |
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- mr |
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- ms |
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- mt |
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- my |
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- ne |
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- nl |
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- no |
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- ny |
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- pa |
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- pl |
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- ps |
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- pt |
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- ro |
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- ru |
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- sd |
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- si |
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- sk |
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- sl |
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- sm |
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- sn |
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- so |
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- sq |
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- sr |
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- st |
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- su |
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- sv |
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- sw |
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- ta |
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- te |
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- tg |
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- th |
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- tr |
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- uk |
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- und |
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- ur |
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- uz |
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- vi |
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- xh |
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- yi |
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- yo |
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- zh |
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- zu |
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datasets: |
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- mc4 |
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license: apache-2.0 |
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--- |
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# ByT5 - Base |
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ByT5 is a tokenizer-free version of [Google's T5](https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/02/exploring-transfer-learning-with-t5.html) and generally follows the architecture of [MT5](https://huggingface.co/google/mt5-base). |
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ByT5 was only pre-trained on [mC4](https://www.tensorflow.org/datasets/catalog/c4#c4multilingual) excluding any supervised training with an average span-mask of 20 UTF-8 characters. Therefore, this model has to be fine-tuned before it is useable on a downstream task. |
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ByT5 works especially well on noisy text data,*e.g.*, `google/byt5-base` significantly outperforms [mt5-base](https://huggingface.co/google/mt5-base) on [TweetQA](https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.06292). |
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Paper: [ByT5: Towards a token-free future with pre-trained byte-to-byte models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.13626) |
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Authors: *Linting Xue, Aditya Barua, Noah Constant, Rami Al-Rfou, Sharan Narang, Mihir Kale, Adam Roberts, Colin Raffel* |
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## Example Inference |
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ByT5 works on raw UTF-8 bytes and can be used without a tokenizer: |
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```python |
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from transformers import T5ForConditionalGeneration |
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import torch |
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model = T5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained('google/byt5-base') |
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input_ids = torch.tensor([list("Life is like a box of chocolates.".encode("utf-8"))]) + 3 # add 3 for special tokens |
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labels = torch.tensor([list("La vie est comme une boîte de chocolat.".encode("utf-8"))]) + 3 # add 3 for special tokens |
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loss = model(input_ids, labels=labels).loss # forward pass |
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``` |
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For batched inference & training it is however recommended using a tokenizer class for padding: |
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```python |
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from transformers import T5ForConditionalGeneration, AutoTokenizer |
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model = T5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained('google/byt5-base') |
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tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('google/byt5-base') |
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model_inputs = tokenizer(["Life is like a box of chocolates.", "Today is Monday."], padding="longest", return_tensors="pt") |
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labels = tokenizer(["La vie est comme une boîte de chocolat.", "Aujourd'hui c'est lundi."], padding="longest", return_tensors="pt").input_ids |
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loss = model(**model_inputs, labels=labels).loss # forward pass |
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``` |
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## Abstract |
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Most widely-used pre-trained language models operate on sequences of tokens corresponding to word or subword units. Encoding text as a sequence of tokens requires a tokenizer, which is typically created as an independent artifact from the model. Token-free models that instead operate directly on raw text (bytes or characters) have many benefits: they can process text in any language out of the box, they are more robust to noise, and they minimize technical debt by removing complex and error-prone text preprocessing pipelines. Since byte or character sequences are longer than token sequences, past work on token-free models has often introduced new model architectures designed to amortize the cost of operating directly on raw text. In this paper, we show that a standard Transformer architecture can be used with minimal modifications to process byte sequences. We carefully characterize the trade-offs in terms of parameter count, training FLOPs, and inference speed, and show that byte-level models are competitive with their token-level counterparts. We also demonstrate that byte-level models are significantly more robust to noise and perform better on tasks that are sensitive to spelling and pronunciation. As part of our contribution, we release a new set of pre-trained byte-level Transformer models based on the T5 architecture, as well as all code and data used in our experiments. |
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