bert VS Cython

In 2019, a new language representation called BERT (Bedirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers) was introduced. The main idea behind this paradigm is to first pre-train a language model using a massive amount of unlabeled data then fine-tune all the parameters using labeled data from the downstream tasks. This allows the model to generalize well to different NLP tasks. Moreover, it has been shown that this language representation model can be used to solve downstream tasks without being explicitly trained on, e.g classify a text without training phase.

task-specific parameters, and is trained on the downstream tasks by simply fine-tuning all pre-trained parameters.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

The release of BERT in 2018 kicked off the language model revolution. The Transformers architecture succeeded RNNs and LSTMs to become the architecture of choice. Unbelievable progress was made in a number of areas: summarization, translation, text classification, entity classification and more. 2023 tooks things to another level with the rise of large language models (LLMs). Models with billions of parameters showed an amazing ability to generate coherent dialogue.

The general idea is that you have a particular task & dataset, and you optimize these vectors to maximize that task. So the properties of these vectors - what information is retained and what is left out during the 'compression' - are effectively determined by that task.

In general, the core task for the various "LLM tools" involves prediction of a hidden word, trained on very large quantities of real text - thus also mirroring whatever structure (linguistic, syntactic, semantic, factual, social bias, etc) exists there.

If you want to see how the sausage is made and look at the actual algorithms, then the key two approaches to read up on would probably be Mikolov's word2vec (https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781) with the CBOW (Continuous Bag of Words) and Continuous Skip-Gram Model, which are based on relatively simple math optimization, and then on the BERT (https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805) structure which does a conceptually similar thing but with a large neural network that can learn more from the same data. For both of them, you can either read the original papers or look up blog posts or videos that explain them, different people have different preferences on how readable academic papers are.

Could you post a link to "the BERT paper"? I've read some, but would be interested reading anything that anyone considered definitive :) Is it this one? "BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding" :https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

Rust crate rust_bert implementation of the BERT language model (https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805 Devlin, Chang, Lee, Toutanova, 2018). The base model is implemented in the bert_model::BertModel struct. Several language model heads have also been implemented, including:

The achievement of training a BERT model to 90% of the GLUE score on a single GPU in ~100 hours is indeed impressive. As for the original BERT pretraining run, the paper [1] mentions that the pretraining took 4 days on 16 TPU chips for the BERT-Base model and 4 days on 64 TPU chips for the BERT-Large model.

Regarding the translation of these techniques to the pretraining phase for a GPT model, it is possible that some of the optimizations and techniques used for BERT could be applied to GPT as well. However, the specific architecture and training objectives of GPT might require different approaches or additional optimizations.

As for the SOPHIA optimizer, it is designed to improve the training of deep learning models by adaptively adjusting the learning rate and momentum. According to the paper [2], SOPHIA has shown promising results in various deep learning tasks. It is possible that the SOPHIA optimizer could help improve the training of BERT and GPT models, but further research and experimentation would be needed to confirm its effectiveness in these specific cases.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805

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The approach that I favour is to use Cython. The nice thing with this approach is that your code is still written as (almost) Python, but so long as you define all required types correctly it will automatically create the C extension for you. Early versions of Cython required using Cython specific typing (Python didn't have type hints when Cython was created), but it can now use Python's type hints.

and again, everything that was released after using an older version of cython.

Just for reference,

* Nuitka[0] "is a Python compiler written in Python. It's fully compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8, 3.9, 3.10, and 3.11."

* Pypy[1] "is a replacement for CPython" with builtin optimizations such as on the fly JIT compiles.

* Cython[2] "is an optimising static compiler for both the Python programming language and the extended Cython programming language... makes writing C extensions for Python as easy as Python itself."

* Numba[3] "is an open source JIT compiler that translates a subset of Python and NumPy code into fast machine code."

* Pyston[4] "is a performance-optimizing JIT for Python, and is drop-in compatible with ... CPython 3.8.12"

[0] https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka

[1] https://www.pypy.org/

[2] https://cython.org/

[3] https://numba.pydata.org/

[4] https://github.com/pyston/pyston

Profile and optimize the hotspots with cython (or whatever the cool kids are using these days... It's been a while.)

JIT essentially means generating machine code for the language on the fly, either during loading of the interpreter (method JIT), or by profiling and optimizing hotspots (tracing JIT). The language itself can be statically or dynamically typed. You could also compile a dynamic language ahead of time, for example, cython.

Cython - - embed demo