Charformer

This repository contains the Mesh-Tensorflow implementation of Charformer: Fast Character Transformers via Gradient-based Subword Tokenization.

This implementation works with the T5-codebase.

Usage

Currently this codebase contains the modules/layers that can be plugged into T5 codebase. We are working on a JAX/FLAX implementation that will be later available in this repository. For now, the Mesh-TF implementation exists as a reference implementation.

One would need to modify transformer.py in https://github.com/tensorflow/mesh to use the provided Charformer layers. The code to inject Charformer layers can be found at https://github.com/tensorflow/mesh/blob/master/mesh_tensorflow/transformer/transformer.py.

Integration Steps

Step 1: Add the following lines to the __init__ function of Unitransformer class.

if self.gradient_subwords:
  tf.logging.info("Using gradient subwords..")
  self.grad_layer = [gradient_subword_layer()] * self.num_gsw_layers

along with new args gradient_subwords, gradient_subword_layer to the class.

Step 2: Right after the positional embeddings, add

if self.gradient_subwords and self.grad_layer:
  tf.logging.info("Using Charformer before computing layer stack.")
  # tensor should be batch x char_length x dim]
  for grad_layer in self.grad_layer:
    x, context = grad_layer.call(context, x)

Step 3: Create a gin config (similar to the one provided in configs/cf_v2_d3_dv_base.gin which you may use in place of any other gin configs in the T5 codebase.

Reference

If you use our work, or find it helpful in some form, please consider citing our paper:

@misc{tay2021charformer,
      title={Charformer: Fast Character Transformers via Gradient-based Subword Tokenization}, 
      author={Yi Tay and Vinh Q. Tran and Sebastian Ruder and Jai Gupta and Hyung Won Chung and Dara Bahri and Zhen Qin and Simon Baumgartner and Cong Yu and Donald Metzler},
      year={2021},
      eprint={2106.12672},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}