Transformers
  • 🌍GET STARTED
    • Transformers
    • Quick tour
    • Installation
  • 🌍TUTORIALS
    • Run inference with pipelines
    • Write portable code with AutoClass
    • Preprocess data
    • Fine-tune a pretrained model
    • Train with a script
    • Set up distributed training with BOINC AI Accelerate
    • Load and train adapters with BOINC AI PEFT
    • Share your model
    • Agents
    • Generation with LLMs
  • 🌍TASK GUIDES
    • 🌍NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING
      • Text classification
      • Token classification
      • Question answering
      • Causal language modeling
      • Masked language modeling
      • Translation
      • Summarization
      • Multiple choice
    • 🌍AUDIO
      • Audio classification
      • Automatic speech recognition
    • 🌍COMPUTER VISION
      • Image classification
      • Semantic segmentation
      • Video classification
      • Object detection
      • Zero-shot object detection
      • Zero-shot image classification
      • Depth estimation
    • 🌍MULTIMODAL
      • Image captioning
      • Document Question Answering
      • Visual Question Answering
      • Text to speech
    • 🌍GENERATION
      • Customize the generation strategy
    • 🌍PROMPTING
      • Image tasks with IDEFICS
  • 🌍DEVELOPER GUIDES
    • Use fast tokenizers from BOINC AI Tokenizers
    • Run inference with multilingual models
    • Use model-specific APIs
    • Share a custom model
    • Templates for chat models
    • Run training on Amazon SageMaker
    • Export to ONNX
    • Export to TFLite
    • Export to TorchScript
    • Benchmarks
    • Notebooks with examples
    • Community resources
    • Custom Tools and Prompts
    • Troubleshoot
  • 🌍PERFORMANCE AND SCALABILITY
    • Overview
    • 🌍EFFICIENT TRAINING TECHNIQUES
      • Methods and tools for efficient training on a single GPU
      • Multiple GPUs and parallelism
      • Efficient training on CPU
      • Distributed CPU training
      • Training on TPUs
      • Training on TPU with TensorFlow
      • Training on Specialized Hardware
      • Custom hardware for training
      • Hyperparameter Search using Trainer API
    • 🌍OPTIMIZING INFERENCE
      • Inference on CPU
      • Inference on one GPU
      • Inference on many GPUs
      • Inference on Specialized Hardware
    • Instantiating a big model
    • Troubleshooting
    • XLA Integration for TensorFlow Models
    • Optimize inference using `torch.compile()`
  • 🌍CONTRIBUTE
    • How to contribute to transformers?
    • How to add a model to BOINC AI Transformers?
    • How to convert a BOINC AI Transformers model to TensorFlow?
    • How to add a pipeline to BOINC AI Transformers?
    • Testing
    • Checks on a Pull Request
  • 🌍CONCEPTUAL GUIDES
    • Philosophy
    • Glossary
    • What BOINC AI Transformers can do
    • How BOINC AI Transformers solve tasks
    • The Transformer model family
    • Summary of the tokenizers
    • Attention mechanisms
    • Padding and truncation
    • BERTology
    • Perplexity of fixed-length models
    • Pipelines for webserver inference
    • Model training anatomy
  • 🌍API
    • 🌍MAIN CLASSES
      • Agents and Tools
      • 🌍Auto Classes
        • Extending the Auto Classes
        • AutoConfig
        • AutoTokenizer
        • AutoFeatureExtractor
        • AutoImageProcessor
        • AutoProcessor
        • Generic model classes
          • AutoModel
          • TFAutoModel
          • FlaxAutoModel
        • Generic pretraining classes
          • AutoModelForPreTraining
          • TFAutoModelForPreTraining
          • FlaxAutoModelForPreTraining
        • Natural Language Processing
          • AutoModelForCausalLM
          • TFAutoModelForCausalLM
          • FlaxAutoModelForCausalLM
          • AutoModelForMaskedLM
          • TFAutoModelForMaskedLM
          • FlaxAutoModelForMaskedLM
          • AutoModelForMaskGenerationge
          • TFAutoModelForMaskGeneration
          • AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM
          • TFAutoModelForSeq2SeqLM
          • FlaxAutoModelForSeq2SeqLM
          • AutoModelForSequenceClassification
          • TFAutoModelForSequenceClassification
          • FlaxAutoModelForSequenceClassification
          • AutoModelForMultipleChoice
          • TFAutoModelForMultipleChoice
          • FlaxAutoModelForMultipleChoice
          • AutoModelForNextSentencePrediction
          • TFAutoModelForNextSentencePrediction
          • FlaxAutoModelForNextSentencePrediction
          • AutoModelForTokenClassification
          • TFAutoModelForTokenClassification
          • FlaxAutoModelForTokenClassification
          • AutoModelForQuestionAnswering
          • TFAutoModelForQuestionAnswering
          • FlaxAutoModelForQuestionAnswering
          • AutoModelForTextEncoding
          • TFAutoModelForTextEncoding
        • Computer vision
          • AutoModelForDepthEstimation
          • AutoModelForImageClassification
          • TFAutoModelForImageClassification
          • FlaxAutoModelForImageClassification
          • AutoModelForVideoClassification
          • AutoModelForMaskedImageModeling
          • TFAutoModelForMaskedImageModeling
          • AutoModelForObjectDetection
          • AutoModelForImageSegmentation
          • AutoModelForImageToImage
          • AutoModelForSemanticSegmentation
          • TFAutoModelForSemanticSegmentation
          • AutoModelForInstanceSegmentation
          • AutoModelForUniversalSegmentation
          • AutoModelForZeroShotImageClassification
          • TFAutoModelForZeroShotImageClassification
          • AutoModelForZeroShotObjectDetection
        • Audio
          • AutoModelForAudioClassification
          • AutoModelForAudioFrameClassification
          • TFAutoModelForAudioFrameClassification
          • AutoModelForCTC
          • AutoModelForSpeechSeq2Seq
          • TFAutoModelForSpeechSeq2Seq
          • FlaxAutoModelForSpeechSeq2Seq
          • AutoModelForAudioXVector
          • AutoModelForTextToSpectrogram
          • AutoModelForTextToWaveform
        • Multimodal
          • AutoModelForTableQuestionAnswering
          • TFAutoModelForTableQuestionAnswering
          • AutoModelForDocumentQuestionAnswering
          • TFAutoModelForDocumentQuestionAnswering
          • AutoModelForVisualQuestionAnswering
          • AutoModelForVision2Seq
          • TFAutoModelForVision2Seq
          • FlaxAutoModelForVision2Seq
      • Callbacks
      • Configuration
      • Data Collator
      • Keras callbacks
      • Logging
      • Models
      • Text Generation
      • ONNX
      • Optimization
      • Model outputs
      • Pipelines
      • Processors
      • Quantization
      • Tokenizer
      • Trainer
      • DeepSpeed Integration
      • Feature Extractor
      • Image Processor
    • 🌍MODELS
      • 🌍TEXT MODELS
        • ALBERT
        • BART
        • BARThez
        • BARTpho
        • BERT
        • BertGeneration
        • BertJapanese
        • Bertweet
        • BigBird
        • BigBirdPegasus
        • BioGpt
        • Blenderbot
        • Blenderbot Small
        • BLOOM
        • BORT
        • ByT5
        • CamemBERT
        • CANINE
        • CodeGen
        • CodeLlama
        • ConvBERT
        • CPM
        • CPMANT
        • CTRL
        • DeBERTa
        • DeBERTa-v2
        • DialoGPT
        • DistilBERT
        • DPR
        • ELECTRA
        • Encoder Decoder Models
        • ERNIE
        • ErnieM
        • ESM
        • Falcon
        • FLAN-T5
        • FLAN-UL2
        • FlauBERT
        • FNet
        • FSMT
        • Funnel Transformer
        • GPT
        • GPT Neo
        • GPT NeoX
        • GPT NeoX Japanese
        • GPT-J
        • GPT2
        • GPTBigCode
        • GPTSAN Japanese
        • GPTSw3
        • HerBERT
        • I-BERT
        • Jukebox
        • LED
        • LLaMA
        • LLama2
        • Longformer
        • LongT5
        • LUKE
        • M2M100
        • MarianMT
        • MarkupLM
        • MBart and MBart-50
        • MEGA
        • MegatronBERT
        • MegatronGPT2
        • Mistral
        • mLUKE
        • MobileBERT
        • MPNet
        • MPT
        • MRA
        • MT5
        • MVP
        • NEZHA
        • NLLB
        • NLLB-MoE
        • Nyströmformer
        • Open-Llama
        • OPT
        • Pegasus
        • PEGASUS-X
        • Persimmon
        • PhoBERT
        • PLBart
        • ProphetNet
        • QDQBert
        • RAG
        • REALM
        • Reformer
        • RemBERT
        • RetriBERT
        • RoBERTa
        • RoBERTa-PreLayerNorm
        • RoCBert
        • RoFormer
        • RWKV
        • Splinter
        • SqueezeBERT
        • SwitchTransformers
        • T5
        • T5v1.1
        • TAPEX
        • Transformer XL
        • UL2
        • UMT5
        • X-MOD
        • XGLM
        • XLM
        • XLM-ProphetNet
        • XLM-RoBERTa
        • XLM-RoBERTa-XL
        • XLM-V
        • XLNet
        • YOSO
      • 🌍VISION MODELS
        • BEiT
        • BiT
        • Conditional DETR
        • ConvNeXT
        • ConvNeXTV2
        • CvT
        • Deformable DETR
        • DeiT
        • DETA
        • DETR
        • DiNAT
        • DINO V2
        • DiT
        • DPT
        • EfficientFormer
        • EfficientNet
        • FocalNet
        • GLPN
        • ImageGPT
        • LeViT
        • Mask2Former
        • MaskFormer
        • MobileNetV1
        • MobileNetV2
        • MobileViT
        • MobileViTV2
        • NAT
        • PoolFormer
        • Pyramid Vision Transformer (PVT)
        • RegNet
        • ResNet
        • SegFormer
        • SwiftFormer
        • Swin Transformer
        • Swin Transformer V2
        • Swin2SR
        • Table Transformer
        • TimeSformer
        • UperNet
        • VAN
        • VideoMAE
        • Vision Transformer (ViT)
        • ViT Hybrid
        • ViTDet
        • ViTMAE
        • ViTMatte
        • ViTMSN
        • ViViT
        • YOLOS
      • 🌍AUDIO MODELS
        • Audio Spectrogram Transformer
        • Bark
        • CLAP
        • EnCodec
        • Hubert
        • MCTCT
        • MMS
        • MusicGen
        • Pop2Piano
        • SEW
        • SEW-D
        • Speech2Text
        • Speech2Text2
        • SpeechT5
        • UniSpeech
        • UniSpeech-SAT
        • VITS
        • Wav2Vec2
        • Wav2Vec2-Conformer
        • Wav2Vec2Phoneme
        • WavLM
        • Whisper
        • XLS-R
        • XLSR-Wav2Vec2
      • 🌍MULTIMODAL MODELS
        • ALIGN
        • AltCLIP
        • BLIP
        • BLIP-2
        • BridgeTower
        • BROS
        • Chinese-CLIP
        • CLIP
        • CLIPSeg
        • Data2Vec
        • DePlot
        • Donut
        • FLAVA
        • GIT
        • GroupViT
        • IDEFICS
        • InstructBLIP
        • LayoutLM
        • LayoutLMV2
        • LayoutLMV3
        • LayoutXLM
        • LiLT
        • LXMERT
        • MatCha
        • MGP-STR
        • Nougat
        • OneFormer
        • OWL-ViT
        • Perceiver
        • Pix2Struct
        • Segment Anything
        • Speech Encoder Decoder Models
        • TAPAS
        • TrOCR
        • TVLT
        • ViLT
        • Vision Encoder Decoder Models
        • Vision Text Dual Encoder
        • VisualBERT
        • X-CLIP
      • 🌍REINFORCEMENT LEARNING MODELS
        • Decision Transformer
        • Trajectory Transformer
      • 🌍TIME SERIES MODELS
        • Autoformer
        • Informer
        • Time Series Transformer
      • 🌍GRAPH MODELS
        • Graphormer
  • 🌍INTERNAL HELPERS
    • Custom Layers and Utilities
    • Utilities for pipelines
    • Utilities for Tokenizers
    • Utilities for Trainer
    • Utilities for Generation
    • Utilities for Image Processors
    • Utilities for Audio processing
    • General Utilities
    • Utilities for Time Series
Powered by GitBook
On this page
  • Philosophy
  • Main concepts
  1. CONCEPTUAL GUIDES

Philosophy

PreviousCONCEPTUAL GUIDESNextGlossary

Last updated 1 year ago

Philosophy

BOINC AI Transformers is an opinionated library built for:

  • machine learning researchers and educators seeking to use, study or extend large-scale Transformers models.

  • hands-on practitioners who want to fine-tune those models or serve them in production, or both.

  • engineers who just want to download a pretrained model and use it to solve a given machine learning task.

The library was designed with two strong goals in mind:

  1. 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: , , and a preprocessing class ( for NLP, for vision, for audio, and for multimodal inputs).

  • All of these classes can be initialized in a simple and unified way from pretrained instances by using a common from_pretrained() method which downloads (if needed), caches and loads the related class instance and associated data (configurations’ hyperparameters, tokenizers’ vocabulary, and models’ weights) from a pretrained checkpoint provided on or your own saved checkpoint.

  • On top of those three base classes, the library provides two APIs: for quickly using a model for inference on a given task and to quickly train or fine-tune a PyTorch model (all TensorFlow models are compatible with Keras.fit).

  • As a consequence, this library is NOT a modular toolbox of building blocks for neural nets. If you want to extend or 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 and saving. If you’d like to learn more about our coding philosophy for models, check out our blog post.

  1. 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.

    • The preprocessing classes and base model APIs are standardized to easily switch between models.

  • Incorporate a subjective selection of promising tools for fine-tuning and investigating these models:

    • A simple and consistent way to add new tokens to the vocabulary and embeddings for fine-tuning.

    • Simple ways to mask and prune Transformer heads.

  • Easily switch between PyTorch, TensorFlow 2.0 and Flax, allowing training with one framework and inference with another.

Main concepts

The library is built around three types of classes for each model:

  • Configuration classes store the hyperparameters required to build a model (such as the number of layers and hidden size). 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).

All these classes can be instantiated from pretrained instances, saved locally, and shared on the Hub with three methods:

  • save_pretrained() lets you save a model, configuration, and preprocessing class locally so that it can be reloaded using from_pretrained().

  • push_to_hub() lets you share a model, configuration, and a preprocessing class to the Hub, so it is easily accessible to everyone.

Model classes can be PyTorch models (), Keras models () or JAX/Flax models () that work with the pretrained weights provided in the library.

Preprocessing classes convert the raw data into a format accepted by the model. A stores the vocabulary for each model and provide methods for encoding and decoding strings in a list of token embedding indices to be fed to a model. preprocess vision inputs, preprocess audio inputs, and a handles multimodal inputs.

from_pretrained() lets you instantiate a model, configuration, and preprocessing class from a pretrained version either provided by the library itself (the supported models can be found on the ) or stored locally (or on a server) by the user.

🌍
configuration
models
tokenizer
image processor
feature extractor
processor
BOINC AI Hub
pipeline()
Trainer
Repeat Yourself
torch.nn.Module
tf.keras.Model
flax.linen.Module
tokenizer
Image processors
feature extractors
processor
Model Hub