Sequence-to-Sequence Training and Evaluation

This directory contains examples for finetuning and evaluating transformers on summarization and translation tasks. For deprecated bertabs instructions, see bertabs/README.md.

Supported Architectures

BartForConditionalGeneration
MarianMTModel
PegasusForConditionalGeneration
MBartForConditionalGeneration
FSMTForConditionalGeneration
T5ForConditionalGeneration

Download the Datasets

XSUM

cd examples/legacy/seq2seq
wget https://cdn-datasets.huggingface.co/summarization/xsum.tar.gz
tar -xzvf xsum.tar.gz
export XSUM_DIR=${PWD}/xsum

this should make a directory called xsum/ with files like test.source. To use your own data, copy that files format. Each article to be summarized is on its own line.

CNN/DailyMail

cd examples/legacy/seq2seq
wget https://cdn-datasets.huggingface.co/summarization/cnn_dm_v2.tgz
tar -xzvf cnn_dm_v2.tgz  # empty lines removed
mv cnn_cln cnn_dm
export CNN_DIR=${PWD}/cnn_dm

this should make a directory called cnn_dm/ with 6 files.

WMT16 English-Romanian Translation Data

download with this command:

wget https://cdn-datasets.huggingface.co/translation/wmt_en_ro.tar.gz
tar -xzvf wmt_en_ro.tar.gz
export ENRO_DIR=${PWD}/wmt_en_ro

this should make a directory called wmt_en_ro/ with 6 files.

WMT English-German

wget https://cdn-datasets.huggingface.co/translation/wmt_en_de.tgz
tar -xzvf wmt_en_de.tgz
export DATA_DIR=${PWD}/wmt_en_de

FSMT datasets (wmt)

Refer to the scripts starting with eval_ under: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/scripts/fsmt

Pegasus (multiple datasets)

Multiple eval datasets are available for download from: https://github.com/stas00/porting/tree/master/datasets/pegasus

Your Data

If you are using your own data, it must be formatted as one directory with 6 files:

train.source
train.target
val.source
val.target
test.source
test.target

The .source files are the input, the .target files are the desired output.

Potential issues

native AMP (--fp16 and no apex) may lead to a huge memory leak and require 10x gpu memory. This has been fixed in pytorch-nightly and the minimal official version to have this fix will be pytorch-1.7.1. Until then if you have to use mixed precision please use AMP only with pytorch-nightly or NVIDIA's apex. Reference: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/8403

Tips and Tricks

General Tips:

since you need to run from examples/legacy/seq2seq, and likely need to modify code, the easiest workflow is fork transformers, clone your fork, and run pip install -e . before you get started.
try --freeze_encoder or --freeze_embeds for faster training/larger batch size. (3hr per epoch with bs=8, see the "xsum_shared_task" command below)
fp16_opt_level=O1 (the default works best).
In addition to the pytorch-lightning .ckpt checkpoint, a transformers checkpoint will be saved. Load it with BartForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained(f'{output_dir}/best_tfmr).
At the moment, --do_predict does not work in a multi-gpu setting. You need to use evaluate_checkpoint or the run_eval.py code.
This warning can be safely ignored:

"Some weights of BartForConditionalGeneration were not initialized from the model checkpoint at facebook/bart-large-xsum and are newly initialized: ['final_logits_bias']"
Both finetuning and eval are 30% faster with --fp16. For that you need to install apex.
Read scripts before you run them!

Summarization Tips:

(summ) 1 epoch at batch size 1 for bart-large takes 24 hours and requires 13GB GPU RAM with fp16 on an NVIDIA-V100.
If you want to run experiments on improving the summarization finetuning process, try the XSUM Shared Task (below). It's faster to train than CNNDM because the summaries are shorter.
For CNN/DailyMail, the default val_max_target_length and test_max_target_length will truncate the ground truth labels, resulting in slightly higher rouge scores. To get accurate rouge scores, you should rerun calculate_rouge on the {output_dir}/test_generations.txt file saved by trainer.test()
--max_target_length=60 --val_max_target_length=60 --test_max_target_length=100 is a reasonable setting for XSUM.
wandb can be used by specifying --logger_name wandb. It is useful for reproducibility. Specify the environment variable WANDB_PROJECT='hf_xsum' to do the XSUM shared task.
If you are finetuning on your own dataset, start from distilbart-cnn-12-6 if you want long summaries and distilbart-xsum-12-6 if you want short summaries. (It rarely makes sense to start from bart-large unless you are a researching finetuning methods).

Update 2018-07-18 Datasets: LegacySeq2SeqDataset will be used for all tokenizers without a prepare_seq2seq_batch method. Otherwise, Seq2SeqDataset will be used. Future work/help wanted: A new dataset to support multilingual tasks.

Fine-tuning using Seq2SeqTrainer

To use Seq2SeqTrainer for fine-tuning you should use the finetune_trainer.py script. It subclasses Trainer to extend it for seq2seq training. Except the Trainer-related TrainingArguments, it shares the same argument names as that of finetune.py file. One notable difference is that calculating generative metrics (BLEU, ROUGE) is optional and is controlled using the --predict_with_generate argument.

With PyTorch 1.6+ it'll automatically use native AMP when --fp16 is set.

To see all the possible command line options, run:

python finetune_trainer.py --help

For multi-gpu training use torch.distributed.launch, e.g. with 2 gpus:

python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node=2  finetune_trainer.py ...

At the moment, Seq2SeqTrainer does not support with teacher distillation.

All Seq2SeqTrainer-based fine-tuning scripts are included in the builtin_trainer directory.

TPU Training

Seq2SeqTrainer supports TPU training with few caveats

As generate method does not work on TPU at the moment, predict_with_generate cannot be used. You should use --prediction_loss_only to only calculate loss, and do not set --do_predict and --predict_with_generate.
All sequences should be padded to be of equal length to avoid extremely slow training. (finetune_trainer.py does this automatically when running on TPU.)

We provide a very simple launcher script named xla_spawn.py that lets you run our example scripts on multiple TPU cores without any boilerplate. Just pass a --num_cores flag to this script, then your regular training script with its arguments (this is similar to the torch.distributed.launch helper for torch.distributed).

builtin_trainer/finetune_tpu.sh script provides minimal arguments needed for TPU training.

The following command fine-tunes sshleifer/student_marian_en_ro_6_3 on TPU V3-8 and should complete one epoch in ~5-6 mins.

./builtin_trainer/train_distil_marian_enro_tpu.sh

Evaluation Commands

To create summaries for each article in dataset, we use run_eval.py, here are a few commands that run eval for different tasks and models. If 'translation' is in your task name, the computed metric will be BLEU. Otherwise, ROUGE will be used.

For t5, you need to specify --task translation_{src}to{tgt} as follows:

export DATA_DIR=wmt_en_ro
./run_eval.py t5-base \
    $DATA_DIR/val.source t5_val_generations.txt \
    --reference_path $DATA_DIR/val.target \
    --score_path enro_bleu.json \
    --task translation_en_to_ro \
    --n_obs 100 \
    --device cuda \
    --fp16 \
    --bs 32

This command works for MBART, although the BLEU score is suspiciously low.

export DATA_DIR=wmt_en_ro
./run_eval.py facebook/mbart-large-en-ro $DATA_DIR/val.source mbart_val_generations.txt \
    --reference_path $DATA_DIR/val.target \
    --score_path enro_bleu.json \
    --task translation \
    --n_obs 100 \
    --device cuda \
    --fp16 \
    --bs 32

Summarization (xsum will be very similar):

export DATA_DIR=cnn_dm
./run_eval.py sshleifer/distilbart-cnn-12-6 $DATA_DIR/val.source dbart_val_generations.txt \
    --reference_path $DATA_DIR/val.target \
    --score_path cnn_rouge.json \
    --task summarization \
    --n_obs 100 \

th 56 \
    --fp16 \
    --bs 32

Multi-GPU Evaluation

here is a command to run xsum evaluation on 8 GPUS. It is more than linearly faster than run_eval.py in some cases because it uses SortishSampler to minimize padding. You can also use it on 1 GPU. data_dir must have {type_path}.source and {type_path}.target. Run ./run_distributed_eval.py --help for all clargs.

python -m torch.distributed.launch --nproc_per_node=8  run_distributed_eval.py \
    --model_name sshleifer/distilbart-large-xsum-12-3  \
    --save_dir xsum_generations \
    --data_dir xsum \
    --fp16  # you can pass generate kwargs like num_beams here, just like run_eval.py

Contributions that implement this command for other distributed hardware setups are welcome!

Single-GPU Eval: Tips and Tricks

When using run_eval.py, the following features can be useful:

if you running the script multiple times and want to make it easier to track what arguments produced that output, use --dump-args. Along with the results it will also dump any custom params that were passed to the script. For example if you used: --num_beams 8 --early_stopping true, the output will be:
```
{'bleu': 26.887, 'n_obs': 10, 'runtime': 1, 'seconds_per_sample': 0.1, 'num_beams': 8, 'early_stopping': True}
```
--info is an additional argument available for the same purpose of tracking the conditions of the experiment. It's useful to pass things that weren't in the argument list, e.g. a language pair --info "lang:en-ru". But also if you pass --info without a value it will fallback to the current date/time string, e.g. 2020-09-13 18:44:43.

If using --dump-args --info, the output will be:
```
{'bleu': 26.887, 'n_obs': 10, 'runtime': 1, 'seconds_per_sample': 0.1, 'num_beams': 8, 'early_stopping': True, 'info': '2020-09-13 18:44:43'}
```
If using --dump-args --info "pair:en-ru chkpt=best, the output will be:
```
{'bleu': 26.887, 'n_obs': 10, 'runtime': 1, 'seconds_per_sample': 0.1, 'num_beams': 8, 'early_stopping': True, 'info': 'pair=en-ru chkpt=best'}
```
if you need to perform a parametric search in order to find the best ones that lead to the highest BLEU score, let run_eval_search.py to do the searching for you.

The script accepts the exact same arguments as run_eval.py, plus an additional argument --search. The value of --search is parsed, reformatted and fed to run_eval.py as additional args.

The format for the --search value is a simple string with hparams and colon separated values to try, e.g.:
```
 --search "num_beams=5:10 length_penalty=0.8:1.0:1.2 early_stopping=true:false"
```
which will generate 12 (2*3*2) searches for a product of each hparam. For example the example that was just used will invoke run_eval.py repeatedly with:
```
 --num_beams 5 --length_penalty 0.8 --early_stopping true
 --num_beams 5 --length_penalty 0.8 --early_stopping false
 [...]
 --num_beams 10 --length_penalty 1.2 --early_stopping false
```
On completion, this function prints a markdown table of the results sorted by the best BLEU score and the winning arguments.

bleu  | num_beams | length_penalty | early_stopping
----- | --------- | -------------- | --------------
26.71 |         5 |            1.1 |              1
26.66 |         5 |            0.9 |              1
26.66 |         5 |            0.9 |              0
26.41 |         5 |            1.1 |              0
21.94 |         1 |            0.9 |              1
21.94 |         1 |            0.9 |              0
21.94 |         1 |            1.1 |              1
21.94 |         1 |            1.1 |              0

Best score args:
stas/wmt19-en-ru data/en-ru/val.source data/en-ru/test_translations.txt --reference_path data/en-ru/val.target --score_path data/en-ru/test_bleu.json --bs 8 --task translation --num_beams 5 --length_penalty 1.1 --early_stopping True

If you pass --info "some experiment-specific info" it will get printed before the results table - this is useful for scripting and multiple runs, so one can tell the different sets of results from each other.

Contributing

follow the standard contributing guidelines and code of conduct.
add tests to test_seq2seq_examples.py
To run only the seq2seq tests, you must be in the root of the repository and run:

pytest examples/seq2seq/

Converting pytorch-lightning checkpoints

pytorch lightning -do_predict often fails, after you are done training, the best way to evaluate your model is to convert it.

This should be done for you, with a file called {save_dir}/best_tfmr.

If that file doesn't exist but you have a lightning .ckpt file, you can run

python convert_pl_checkpoint_to_hf.py PATH_TO_CKPT  randomly_initialized_hf_model_path save_dir/best_tfmr

Then either run_eval or run_distributed_eval with save_dir/best_tfmr (see previous sections)

Experimental Features

These features are harder to use and not always useful.

Dynamic Batch Size for MT

finetune.py has a command line arg --max_tokens_per_batch that allows batches to be dynamically sized. This feature can only be used:

with fairseq installed
on 1 GPU
without sortish sampler
after calling ./save_len_file.py $tok $data_dir

For example,

./save_len_file.py Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-ro  wmt_en_ro
./dynamic_bs_example.sh --max_tokens_per_batch=2000 --output_dir benchmark_dynamic_bs

splits wmt_en_ro/train into 11,197 uneven lengthed batches and can finish 1 epoch in 8 minutes on a v100.

For comparison,

./dynamic_bs_example.sh --sortish_sampler --train_batch_size 48

uses 12,723 batches of length 48 and takes slightly more time 9.5 minutes.

The feature is still experimental, because:

we can make it much more robust if we have memory mapped/preprocessed datasets.
The speedup over sortish sampler is not that large at the moment.