UltraFastBERT

The repository for the paper "Exponentially Faster Language Modelling"

https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.10770

Organisation

1. The training folder contains a clone of the crammedBERT repository from the beginning of October 2023. A few new configurations and small modifications have been made to enable the use of FFFs. A masking implementation (i.e. an implementation of FFFs that offers no speed advantage over FFs but simulates its selective engagement of neurons by masking) is provided for training and downstream finetuning.
2. The benchmark_cpu folder contains C++ code using Intel MKL 2023.2.0 to implement accelerated CPU versions of FFF inference as well as baseline DMM implementations of the traditional FF layers.
3. benchmark_pytorch folder contains the C++ code for the "Native fused" and "PyTorch BMM" implementations of both FF and FFF inference.
4. benchmark_cuda folder contains the C++/CUDA kernel code for the "Naive CUDA" implementations of FF and FFF.

Reproducing the results from weights

The configuration and weights for UltraFastBERT-1x11-long can be found on HuggingFace:

https://huggingface.co/pbelcak/UltraFastBERT-1x11-long

These files have been produced and uploaded using training/load_local_model.py with impl.push_to_huggingface_hub=True.

UltraFastBERT-1x11-long, as a model, is an instance of our small extension of the crammedBERT setup. You can simply enter the training directory and follow the steps given in the crammingBERT README to use HuggingFace AutoTokenizer and AutoModelForMaskedLM, with the difference that you want UltraFastBERT-1x11-long, and not crammedBERT.

Quickstart

1. Create a new Python/conda environment, or simply use one that does not have any previous version of the original cramming project installed. If, by accident, you use the original cramming repository code instead of the one provided in the /training folder of this project, you will be warned by transformers that there are some extra weights (FFF weight) and that some weights are missing (the FF weights expected by the original crammedBERT).
2. cd ./training
3. pip install .
4. Create minimal_example.py
5. Paste the code below

import cramming
from transformers import AutoModelForMaskedLM, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("pbelcak/UltraFastBERT-1x11-long")
model = AutoModelForMaskedLM.from_pretrained("pbelcak/UltraFastBERT-1x11-long")

text = "Replace me by any text you'd like."
encoded_input = tokenizer(text, return_tensors='pt')
output = model(**encoded_input)

6. Run python minimal_example.py.

Reproducing the results from scratch

1. To reproduce our training and finetuning results, simply head straight down to the training folder and follow the instructions of the README there.
2. To reproduce our CPU speed benchmarking results, head to benchmark_cpu. If you're on Windows, the easiest way to compile&run the code might be to use Visual Studio 2022 Community with the Intel oneAPI extension. The other option is to use the Intel compilers directly (more information on the Intel oneAPI "Getting started" websites).
3. benchmark_pytorch results can be reproduced by running python main.py in the folder. The outcomes of these runs are automatically put into a SQLite results.db file for the ease of inspection.
4. benchmark_cuda requires the CUDA Toolkit. Once installed, using python setup.py install in the extension folder will do the CUDA code compilation for you and prepare a module that can be imported.