tinyroberta for Extractive QA

This is the distilled version of the deepset/roberta-base-squad2 model. This model has a comparable prediction quality and runs at twice the speed of the base model.

Overview

Language model: tinyroberta-squad2
Language: English
Downstream-task: Extractive QA
Training data: SQuAD 2.0
Eval data: SQuAD 2.0
Code: See an example extractive QA pipeline built with Haystack
Infrastructure: 4x Tesla v100

Hyperparameters

batch_size = 96
n_epochs = 4
base_LM_model = "deepset/tinyroberta-squad2-step1"
max_seq_len = 384
learning_rate = 3e-5
lr_schedule = LinearWarmup
warmup_proportion = 0.2
doc_stride = 128
max_query_length = 64
distillation_loss_weight = 0.75
temperature = 1.5
teacher = "deepset/robert-large-squad2"

Distillation

This model was distilled using the TinyBERT approach described in this paper and implemented in haystack. Firstly, we have performed intermediate layer distillation with roberta-base as the teacher which resulted in deepset/tinyroberta-6l-768d. Secondly, we have performed task-specific distillation with deepset/roberta-base-squad2 as the teacher for further intermediate layer distillation on an augmented version of SQuADv2 and then with deepset/roberta-large-squad2 as the teacher for prediction layer distillation.

Usage

In Haystack

Haystack is an AI orchestration framework to build customizable, production-ready LLM applications. You can use this model in Haystack to do extractive question answering on documents. To load and run the model with Haystack:

# After running pip install haystack-ai "transformers[torch,sentencepiece]"

from haystack import Document
from haystack.components.readers import ExtractiveReader

docs = [
    Document(content="Python is a popular programming language"),
    Document(content="python ist eine beliebte Programmiersprache"),
]

reader = ExtractiveReader(model="deepset/tinyroberta-squad2")
reader.warm_up()

question = "What is a popular programming language?"
result = reader.run(query=question, documents=docs)
# {'answers': [ExtractedAnswer(query='What is a popular programming language?', score=0.5740374326705933, data='python', document=Document(id=..., content: '...'), context=None, document_offset=ExtractedAnswer.Span(start=0, end=6),...)]}

For a complete example with an extractive question answering pipeline that scales over many documents, check out the corresponding Haystack tutorial.

In Transformers

from transformers import AutoModelForQuestionAnswering, AutoTokenizer, pipeline

model_name = "deepset/tinyroberta-squad2"

# a) Get predictions
nlp = pipeline('question-answering', model=model_name, tokenizer=model_name)
QA_input = {
    'question': 'Why is model conversion important?',
    'context': 'The option to convert models between FARM and transformers gives freedom to the user and let people easily switch between frameworks.'
}
res = nlp(QA_input)

# b) Load model & tokenizer
model = AutoModelForQuestionAnswering.from_pretrained(model_name)
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)

Performance

Evaluated on the SQuAD 2.0 dev set with the official eval script.

"exact": 78.69114798281817,
"f1": 81.9198998536977,

"total": 11873,
"HasAns_exact": 76.19770580296895,
"HasAns_f1": 82.66446878592329,
"HasAns_total": 5928,
"NoAns_exact": 81.17746005046257,
"NoAns_f1": 81.17746005046257,
"NoAns_total": 5945

Authors

Branden Chan: branden.chan@deepset.ai
Timo Möller: timo.moeller@deepset.ai
Malte Pietsch: malte.pietsch@deepset.ai
Tanay Soni: tanay.soni@deepset.ai
Michel Bartels: michel.bartels@deepset.ai

About us

deepset is the company behind the production-ready open-source AI framework Haystack.

Some of our other work:

• Distilled roberta-base-squad2 (aka "tinyroberta-squad2")
• German BERT, GermanQuAD and GermanDPR, German embedding model
• deepset Cloud, deepset Studio

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