tokenizers VS onnxruntime

Hugging Face seems to like Rust. They also wrote Tokenizers in Rust.

Your intuition is right. There are two ways (in increasing order of result performance) : 1. You can simply extend vocab file of the tokenizer and test the predictions 2. You can extend the vocab file and re-train your model on custom data which has these new tokens. Check the following issue on GitHub : https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers/issues/247

SentencePiece -> implementation of some algorithms (there are several others, https://github.com/microsoft/BlingFire https://github.com/glample/fastBPE https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers )

In sum I would like the idea to go with Rust as I more or less got to rewrite the whole thing anyway, but I am a bit skeptical if I will be able to interface with everything that might come up at some point. Or probably end up in a wrapper hell if I got to use more C++ libraries. On the other hand there are definitely a few Rust projects out there that might come in handy (for example https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers). And the build process is pretty awful right now (CMake it is but with lots of hacks).

A full machine learning pipeline usually comprises far more than just the model, and this is the area where Rust may shine (the recent work by HuggingFace and their https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers library is a good example)

As for other tokenizers, you can take a look at - Huggingface tokenizers library: https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers - NLTK tokenize: https://www.nltk.org/api/nltk.tokenize.html - Polygot: https://pypi.org/project/polyglot/

Huggingface Tokenizers (https://github.com/huggingface/tokenizers), which are now used by default in their Transformers Python library, use pyO3 and became popular due to the pitch that it encoded text an order of magnitude faster with zero config changes.

It lives up to that claim. (I had issues with return object typing when going between Python/Rust at first but those are more consistent now)

huggingface/tokenizers (Rust): 💥Fast State-of-the-Art Tokenizers optimized for Research and Production

ONNX Runtime: ONNX Runtime: cross-platform, high performance ML inferencing and training accelerator

Embedding generation uses the ONNX runtime under the hood. This is a cross-platform inferencing library that supports multiple execution providers from CPU to specialized GPUs.

tfjs is dead, looking at the commit history. The standard now is to convert PyTorch to onnx, then use onnxruntime (https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/tree/main/js/web) to run the model on the browsdr.

- slang[2] has the potential, but the meta programming part is not as strong as C++, existing libraries cannot be used.

The above conclusion is drawn from my work https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime/tree/dev/opencl, purely nightmare to work with thoes drivers and jit compilers. Hopefully Vcc can take compute shader more seriously.

[1]: https://www.circle-lang.org/

I did. It depends what you want, for an overview of how ONNX Runtime works then Microsoft have a bunch of things on https://onnxruntime.ai, but the Java content is a bit lacking on there as I've not had time to write much. Eventually I'll probably write something similar to the C# SD tutorial they have on there but for the Java API.

For writing ONNX models from Java we added an ONNX export system to Tribuo in 2022 which can be used by anything on the JVM to export ONNX models in an easier way than writing a protobuf directly. Tribuo doesn't have full coverage of the ONNX spec, but we're happy to accept PRs to expand it, otherwise it'll fill out as we need it.

What about models besides GPT? Most of the popular vector encoding models aren't using this architecture.

If you really didn't want PyTorch/Transformers, you could consider exporting your models to ONNX (https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime).