syntaxdot VS candle

I am so happy about them releasing this. A few years ago I wrote a multi-task syntax annotator in Rust using Laurent Mazare's excellent tch-rs binding (it seems like he is also working on Candle):

https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot

However, the deployment story was always quite difficult. The PyTorch C++ API is not stable, so a particular version of tch-rs will only work with a particular PyTorch version. So, anyone wanting to use SyntaxDot always had to get exactly the right version of libtorch (and set some environment variables) to build the project.

The idea of making an abstraction over Torch and Rust ndarray (similar to Burn) crossed my mind several times, but there is only so much that I could do as a solo developer. So Candle would be a god-given if I was still working on this project.

Seeing Candle wants to make me port curated-transformers to Candle for fun:

https://github.com/explosion/curated-transformers

They are obviously not as good as in Python, but if you are willing to invest time, it's definitely doable. E.g. I made a multi-task transformer-based syntax annotator in Rust using the tch Torch binding:

https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot

In my current job, I do NLP with Python, Cython, and some C++. I don't think doing it in Rust was much more work. Once you are beyond the stage of implementing a small research project or toy model, most systems are going to contain a lot of custom, specialized code. You will have to do that work in any language.

What I like about PyTorch is that most of the functionality is actually available through the C++ API as well, which has 'beta API stability' as they call it. So, there are good bindings for some other languages as well. E.g., I have been using the Rust bindings in a larger project [1], and they have been awesome. A precursor to the project was implemented using Tensorflow, which was a world of pain.

Even things like mixed-precision training are fairly easy to do through the API.

[1] https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot

Huggingface fills the need for task based prediction when you have a GPU.

With model distillation, it should be possible to annotate hundreds of sentences per second on a single CPU with a library like Huggingface Transformers.

For instance, one of my distilled Dutch multi-task syntax models (UD POS, language-specific POS, lemmatization, morphology, dependency parsing) annotates 316 sentences per second with 4 threads on a Ryzen 3700X. This distilled model has virtually no loss in accuracy, compared to the finetuned XLM-RoBERTa base model.

I don't use Huggingface Transformers, but ported some of their implementations to Rust [1], but that should not make a big difference since all the heavy lifting happens in C++ in libtorch anyway.

tl;dr: it is not true that tranformers are only useful for GPU prediction. You can get high CPU prediction speeds with some tricks (distillation, length-based bucketing in batches, etc.).

[1] https://github.com/tensordot/syntaxdot/tree/main/syntaxdot-t...

Candle already exists[1], and it runs pretty well. Can use both CUDA and Metal backends (or just plain-old CPU).

[1] https://github.com/huggingface/candle

Check out Candle! It's a Deep Learning framework for Rust. You can run LLMs in binaries.

Kalosm is a meta-framework for AI written in Rust using candle. Kalosm supports local quantized large language models like Llama, Mistral, Phi-1.5, and Zephyr. It also supports other quantized models like Wuerstchen, Segment Anything, and Whisper. In addition to local models, Kalosm supports remote models like GPT-4 and ada embeddings.

I have been working on a machine learning library called candle-lora for Candle. It implementes a technique called LoRA (low rank adaptation), which allows you to reduce a model's trainable parameter count by wrapping and freezing old layers.

[2] https://github.com/huggingface/candle/issues/313

We provide full local inference in browser, by using libraries from Hugging Face like transformers.js or candle for WASM inference.

We've first announced Candle, a minimalist ML framework in Rust 6 weeks ago. Since then we've focused on adding various recent models and improved the framework so as to support the necessary features in an efficient way. You can checkout a gallery of the examples, supported models include:

How did you select those two as your options?

I'm just a hobbyist that enjoys programming, and I eventually wanted to expand beyond python. I looked at Haskell and read Learn You a Haskell and did some Exercism exercises but never got anywhere close to being able to use it for real projects. Have been trying to learn about Lisp lately and feel like I've come to a similar dead end.

On the other hand, both Go and Rust have felt fulfilling and practical, with static typing and solid tooling, cross compilations, static binaries, and dependency management that is just a huge breath of fresh air coming from python.

The ML / data science scene is nowhere near as developed as in Python, and I still lean on jupyter/polars/PyTorch here, but I think the candle project[0] seems very interesting. Compiling whisper down to a single CUDA-leveraging binary for fast local transcription is pretty cool!

[0]: https://github.com/huggingface/candle