This folder contains the original code used to train Distil* as well as examples showcasing how to use DistilBERT, DistilRoBERTa and DistilGPT2.
**December 6th, 2019 - Update** We release **DistilmBERT**: 92% of `bert-base-multilingual-cased` on XNLI. The model supports 104 different languages listed [here](https://github.com/google-research/bert/blob/master/multilingual.md#list-of-languages).
**January 20, 2020 - Bug fixing** We have recently discovered and fixed [a bug](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/commit/48cbf267c988b56c71a2380f748a3e6092ccaed3) in the evaluation of our `run_*.py` scripts that caused the reported metrics to be over-estimated on average. We have updated all the metrics with the latest runs.
**November 19th, 2019 - Update** We release German **DistilBERT**: 98.8% of `bert-base-german-dbmdz-cased` on NER tasks.
**December 6, 2019 - Update** We release **DistilmBERT**: 92% of `bert-base-multilingual-cased` on XNLI. The model supports 104 different languages listed [here](https://github.com/google-research/bert/blob/master/multilingual.md#list-of-languages).
**October 23rd, 2019 - Update** We release **DistilRoBERTa**: 95% of `RoBERTa-base`'s performance on GLUE, twice as fast as RoBERTa while being 35% smaller.
**November 19, 2019 - Update** We release German **DistilBERT**: 98.8% of `bert-base-german-dbmdz-cased` on NER tasks.
**October 3rd, 2019 - Update** We release our [NeurIPS workshop paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108) explaining our approach on **DistilBERT**. It includes updated results and further experiments. We applied the same method to GPT2 and release the weights of **DistilGPT2**. DistilGPT2 is two times faster and 33% smaller than GPT2. **The paper superseeds our [previous blogpost](https://medium.com/huggingface/distilbert-8cf3380435b5) with a different distillation loss and better performances. Please use the paper as a reference when comparing/reporting results on DistilBERT.**
**October 23, 2019 - Update** We release **DistilRoBERTa**: 95% of `RoBERTa-base`'s performance on GLUE, twice as fast as RoBERTa while being 35% smaller.
**September 19th, 2019 - Update:** We fixed bugs in the code and released an upadted version of the weights trained with a modification of the distillation loss. DistilBERT now reaches 97% of `BERT-base`'s performance on GLUE, and 86.9 F1 score on SQuAD v1.1 dev set (compared to 88.5 for `BERT-base`). We will publish a formal write-up of our approach in the near future!
**October 3, 2019 - Update** We release our [NeurIPS workshop paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01108) explaining our approach on **DistilBERT**. It includes updated results and further experiments. We applied the same method to GPT2 and release the weights of **DistilGPT2**. DistilGPT2 is two times faster and 33% smaller than GPT2. **The paper superseeds our [previous blogpost](https://medium.com/huggingface/distilbert-8cf3380435b5) with a different distillation loss and better performances. Please use the paper as a reference when comparing/reporting results on DistilBERT.**
**September 19, 2019 - Update:** We fixed bugs in the code and released an upadted version of the weights trained with a modification of the distillation loss. DistilBERT now reaches 99% of `BERT-base`'s performance on GLUE, and 86.9 F1 score on SQuAD v1.1 dev set (compared to 88.5 for `BERT-base`). We will publish a formal write-up of our approach in the near future!
## What is Distil*
Distil* is a class of compressed models that started with DistilBERT. DistilBERT stands for Distillated-BERT. DistilBERT is a small, fast, cheap and light Transformer model based on Bert architecture. It has 40% less parameters than `bert-base-uncased`, runs 60% faster while preserving 97% of BERT's performances as measured on the GLUE language understanding benchmark. DistilBERT is trained using knowledge distillation, a technique to compress a large model called the teacher into a smaller model called the student. By distillating Bert, we obtain a smaller Transformer model that bears a lot of similarities with the original BERT model while being lighter, smaller and faster to run. DistilBERT is thus an interesting option to put large-scaled trained Transformer model into production.
Distil* is a class of compressed models that started with DistilBERT. DistilBERT stands for Distillated-BERT. DistilBERT is a small, fast, cheap and light Transformer model based on Bert architecture. It has 40% less parameters than `bert-base-uncased`, runs 60% faster while preserving 99% of BERT's performances as measured on the GLUE language understanding benchmark. DistilBERT is trained using knowledge distillation, a technique to compress a large model called the teacher into a smaller model called the student. By distillating Bert, we obtain a smaller Transformer model that bears a lot of similarities with the original BERT model while being lighter, smaller and faster to run. DistilBERT is thus an interesting option to put large-scaled trained Transformer model into production.
We have applied the same method to other Transformer architectures and released the weights:
- GPT2: on the [WikiText-103](https://blog.einstein.ai/the-wikitext-long-term-dependency-language-modeling-dataset/) benchmark, GPT2 reaches a perplexity on the test set of 15.0 compared to 18.5 for **DistilGPT2** (after fine-tuning on the train set).
- GPT2: on the [WikiText-103](https://blog.einstein.ai/the-wikitext-long-term-dependency-language-modeling-dataset/) benchmark, GPT2 reaches a perplexity on the test set of 16.3 compared to 21.1 for **DistilGPT2** (after fine-tuning on the train set).
- RoBERTa: **DistilRoBERTa** reaches 95% of `RoBERTa-base`'s performance on GLUE while being twice faster and 35% smaller.
- German BERT: **German DistilBERT** reaches 99% of `bert-base-german-dbmdz-cased`'s performance on German NER (CoNLL-2003).
- Multilingual BERT: **DistilmBERT** reaches 92% of Multilingual BERT's performance on XNLI while being twice faster and 25% smaller. The model supports 104 languages listed [here](https://github.com/google-research/bert/blob/master/multilingual.md#list-of-languages).
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@@ -29,11 +31,11 @@ Here are the results on the dev sets of GLUE:
