OpenAI GPT2¶
Overview¶
OpenAI GPT-2 model was proposed in Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners by Alec Radford*, Jeffrey Wu*, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei** and Ilya Sutskever**. It’s a causal (unidirectional) transformer pre-trained using language modeling on a very large corpus of ~40 GB of text data.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
GPT-2 is a large transformer-based language model with 1.5 billion parameters, trained on a dataset[1] of 8 million web pages. GPT-2 is trained with a simple objective: predict the next word, given all of the previous words within some text. The diversity of the dataset causes this simple goal to contain naturally occurring demonstrations of many tasks across diverse domains. GPT-2 is a direct scale-up of GPT, with more than 10X the parameters and trained on more than 10X the amount of data.
Tips:
GPT-2 is a model with absolute position embeddings so it’s usually advised to pad the inputs on the right rather than the left.
GPT-2 was trained with a causal language modeling (CLM) objective and is therefore powerful at predicting the next token in a sequence. Leveraging this feature allows GPT-2 to generate syntactically coherent text as it can be observed in the run_generation.py example script.
The PyTorch models can take the past as input, which is the previously computed key/value attention pairs. Using this past value prevents the model from re-computing pre-computed values in the context of text generation. See reusing the past in generative models for more information on the usage of this argument.
Write With Transformer is a webapp created and hosted by Hugging Face showcasing the generative capabilities of several models. GPT-2 is one of them and is available in five different sizes: small, medium, large, xl and a distilled version of the small checkpoint: distilgpt-2.