Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By : Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu
Book Image

Mastering Transformers

By: Savaş Yıldırım, Meysam Asgari- Chenaghlu

Overview of this book

Transformer-based language models have dominated natural language processing (NLP) studies and have now become a new paradigm. With this book, you'll learn how to build various transformer-based NLP applications using the Python Transformers library. The book gives you an introduction to Transformers by showing you how to write your first hello-world program. You'll then learn how a tokenizer works and how to train your own tokenizer. As you advance, you'll explore the architecture of autoencoding models, such as BERT, and autoregressive models, such as GPT. You'll see how to train and fine-tune models for a variety of natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) problems, including text classification, token classification, and text representation. This book also helps you to learn efficient models for challenging problems, such as long-context NLP tasks with limited computational capacity. You'll also work with multilingual and cross-lingual problems, optimize models by monitoring their performance, and discover how to deconstruct these models for interpretability and explainability. Finally, you'll be able to deploy your transformer models in a production environment. By the end of this NLP book, you'll have learned how to use Transformers to solve advanced NLP problems using advanced models.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introduction – Recent Developments in the Field, Installations, and Hello World Applications
4
Section 2: Transformer Models – From Autoencoding to Autoregressive Models
10
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Introduction to efficient, light, and fast transformers

Transformer-based models have distinctly achieved state-of-the-art results in many NLP problems at the cost of quadratic memory and computational complexity. We can highlight the issues regarding complexity as follows:

  • The models are not able to efficiently process long sequences due to their self-attention mechanism, which scales quadratically with the sequence length.
  • An experimental setup using a typical GPU with 16 GB can handle the sentences of 512 tokens for training and inference. However, longer entries can cause problems.
  • The NLP models keep growing from the 110 million parameters of BERT-base to the 17 billion parameters of Turing-NLG and to the 175 billion parameters of GPT-3. This notion raises concerns about computational and memory complexity.
  • We also need to care about costs, production, reproducibility, and sustainability. Hence, we need faster and lighter transformers, especially on edge...