transformers VS sentence-transformers

Compare transformers vs sentence-transformers and see what are their differences.

Scout Monitoring - Free Django app performance insights with Scout Monitoring
Get Scout setup in minutes, and let us sweat the small stuff. A couple lines in settings.py is all you need to start monitoring your apps. Sign up for our free tier today.
www.scoutapm.com
featured
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured
transformers sentence-transformers
181 46
127,531 14,161
2.0% 2.6%
10.0 9.4
about 12 hours ago 7 days ago
Python Python
Apache License 2.0 Apache License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

transformers

Posts with mentions or reviews of transformers. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-05-21.
  • How to count tokens in frontend for Popular LLM Models: GPT, Claude, and Llama
    2 projects | dev.to | 21 May 2024
    Thanks to transformers.js, we can run the tokenizer and model locally in the browser. Transformers.js is designed to be functionally equivalent to Hugging Face's transformers python library, meaning you can run the same pretrained models using a very similar API.
  • Reading list to join AI field from Hugging Face cofounder
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 18 May 2024
    Not sure what you are implying. Thomas Wolf has the second highest number of commits on HuggingFace/transformers. He is clearly competent & deeply technical

    https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/

  • Llama3.np: pure NumPy implementation of Llama3
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 May 2024
    Sure, knowing the basics of LLM math is necessary. But it's also _enough_ to know this math to fully grasp the code. There are only 4 concepts - attention, feed-forward net, RMS-normalization and rotary embeddings - organized into a clear structure.

    Now compare it to the Hugginface implementation [1]. In addition to the aforementioned concepts, you need to understand the hierarchy of `PreTrainedModel`s, 3 types of attention, 3 types of rotary embeddings, HF's definition of attention mask (which is not the same as mask you read about in transformer tutorials), several types of cache class, dozens of flags to control things like output format or serialization, etc.

    It's not that Meta's implementation is good and HF's implementation is bad - they pursue different goals in their own optimal way. But if you just want to learn how the model works, Meta's code base is great.

    [1]: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/src/tr...

  • XLSTM: Extended Long Short-Term Memory
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 May 2024
    Fascinating work, very promising.

    Can you summarise how the model in your paper differs from this one ?

    https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/27011

  • AI enthusiasm #9 - A multilingual chatbot📣🈸
    6 projects | dev.to | 1 May 2024
    transformers is a package by Hugging Face, that helps you interact with models on HF Hub (GitHub)
  • Maxtext: A simple, performant and scalable Jax LLM
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Apr 2024
    Is t5x an encoder/decoder architecture?

    Some more general options.

    The Flax ecosystem

    https://github.com/google/flax?tab=readme-ov-file

    or dm-haiku

    https://github.com/google-deepmind/dm-haiku

    were some of the best developed communities in the Jax AI field

    Perhaps the “trax” repo? https://github.com/google/trax

    Some HF examples https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/main/exampl...

    Sadly it seems much of the work is proprietary these days, but one example could be Grok-1, if you customize the details. https://github.com/xai-org/grok-1/blob/main/run.py

  • Lossless Acceleration of LLM via Adaptive N-Gram Parallel Decoding
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Apr 2024
    The HuggingFace transformers library already has support for a similar method called prompt lookup decoding that uses the existing context to generate an ngram model: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/27722

    I don't think it would be that hard to switch it out for a pretrained ngram model.

  • AI enthusiasm #6 - Finetune any LLM you want💡
    2 projects | dev.to | 16 Apr 2024
    Most of this tutorial is based on Hugging Face course about Transformers and on Niels Rogge's Transformers tutorials: make sure to check their work and give them a star on GitHub, if you please ❤️
  • Schedule-Free Learning – A New Way to Train
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Apr 2024
    * Superconvergence + LR range finder + Fast AI's Ranger21 optimizer was the goto optimizer for CNNs, and worked fabulously well, but on transformers, the learning rate range finder sadi 1e-3 was the best, whilst 1e-5 was better. However, the 1 cycle learning rate stuck. https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/issues/16013
  • Gemma doesn't suck anymore – 8 bug fixes
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Mar 2024
    Thanks! :) I'm pushing them into transformers, pytorch-gemma and collabing with the Gemma team to resolve all the issues :)

    The RoPE fix should already be in transformers 4.38.2: https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/pull/29285

    My main PR for transformers which fixes most of the issues (some still left): https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/pull/29402

sentence-transformers

Posts with mentions or reviews of sentence-transformers. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-04-26.
  • Sentence Transformers v3.0
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2024
  • External vectorization
    1 project | dev.to | 29 Jan 2024
    txtai is an open-source first system. Given it's own open-source roots, like-minded projects such as sentence-transformers are prioritized during development. But that doesn't mean txtai can't work with Embeddings API services.
  • [D] Looking for a better multilingual embedding model
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 25 May 2023
    Ok great. My use case is not very specific, but rather general. I am looking for a model that can perform asymmetric semantic search for the languages I mentioned earlier (Urdu, Persian, Arabic etc.). I have also looked into the sentence-transformer training documentation. Do you think it would be a good idea to use the XNLI dataset for fine-tuning? Or maybe you can suggest much better dataset. Furthermore, I am not sure if fine-tuning is suitable for my task. Because my use case is general so I can use already trained model.
  • Best pathway for Domain Adaptation with Sentence Transformers?
    3 projects | /r/LanguageTechnology | 26 Apr 2023
  • Syntactic and Semantic surprisal using a LLM
    1 project | /r/LanguageTechnology | 26 Feb 2023
    The task you are looking for is semantic textual similarity. There are a few models and datasets out there that can do this. I'd probably start with the SemEval2017 Task 1 task description and competition entries here and then work outward from there (using something like SemanticScholar or Papers With Code to find newer state of the art works that cite these models if needed). For what it's worth you might find that Sentence Bert (SBERT) gives good vectors for cosine similarity comparison out of the box for this task.
  • Mean pooling in BERT
    1 project | /r/LanguageTechnology | 20 Feb 2023
    Check out the sentence-transformers implementation. If I don't miss anything they don't exclude CLS when the pooling strategy is set to 'mean'
  • I Built an AI Search Engine that can find exact timestamps for anything on Youtube using OpenAI Whisper
    7 projects | /r/OpenAI | 22 Jan 2023
    Break up transcript into shorter segments and convert segments to a 768 vector array. Use a process known as embedding using our second ML model, UKP Labs BERT’s sentence transformer model.
  • Seeking advice on improving NLP search results
    4 projects | /r/LanguageTechnology | 22 Jan 2023
    Not sure what kind of texts you have, but these models have a max sequence limit of 512 (approx 350 words or so). If you're texts are longer than that, consider splitting them up into chunks or creating a summary and taking an embedding of that. Some clustering algorithm may be the way to go here. Here's a bunch of examples. I use agglomerative for my use case.
  • Dev Diary #12 - Finetune model
    1 project | /r/RecMe | 11 Jan 2023
    https://github.com/UKPLab/sentence-transformers/tree/master/examples/training/data_augmentation (Augmented Encoding)
  • [R] Customize size of Bio-BERT pre-trained embeddings
    1 project | /r/MachineLearning | 30 Dec 2022
    For vector representation you can take the mean and then pca to get the size that you want, but if you have time then use sentence transformers to train a vector representation instead.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing transformers and sentence-transformers you can also consider the following projects:

fairseq - Facebook AI Research Sequence-to-Sequence Toolkit written in Python.

onnx - Open standard for machine learning interoperability

llama - Inference code for Llama models

CLIP - CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining), Predict the most relevant text snippet given an image

transformer-pytorch - Transformer: PyTorch Implementation of "Attention Is All You Need"

Top2Vec - Top2Vec learns jointly embedded topic, document and word vectors.

text-generation-webui - A Gradio web UI for Large Language Models. Supports transformers, GPTQ, AWQ, EXL2, llama.cpp (GGUF), Llama models.

txtai - 💡 All-in-one open-source embeddings database for semantic search, LLM orchestration and language model workflows

huggingface_hub - The official Python client for the Huggingface Hub.

datasets - 🤗 The largest hub of ready-to-use datasets for ML models with fast, easy-to-use and efficient data manipulation tools

OpenNMT-py - Open Source Neural Machine Translation and (Large) Language Models in PyTorch

faiss - A library for efficient similarity search and clustering of dense vectors.

Scout Monitoring - Free Django app performance insights with Scout Monitoring
Get Scout setup in minutes, and let us sweat the small stuff. A couple lines in settings.py is all you need to start monitoring your apps. Sign up for our free tier today.
www.scoutapm.com
featured
InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
www.influxdata.com
featured