Italian T5 Base (Oscar) 🇮🇹

This repository contains the model formerly known as gsarti/t5-base-it

The IT5 model family represents the first effort in pretraining large-scale sequence-to-sequence transformer models for the Italian language, following the approach adopted by the original T5 model.

This model is released as part of the project "IT5: Large-Scale Text-to-Text Pretraining for Italian Language Understanding and Generation" (to be released), by Gabriele Sarti with the support of Huggingface and with TPU usage sponsored by Google's TPU Research Cloud. All the training was conducted on a single TPU3v8-VM machine on Google Cloud. Refer to the Tensorboard tab of the repository for an overview of the training process.

The inference widget is deactivated because the model needs a task-specific seq2seq fine-tuning on a downstream task to be useful in practice. The model gsarti/it5-base-nli provides an example of this model fine-tuned on a downstream NLI task.

Model variants

This repository contains the checkpoints for a base version of the model trained on the OSCAR corpus using 🤗 Datasets. The original configuration for the model t5-base was adopted, with the exception of the parameter dropout_rate that was set at 0 instead of 0.1 during pre-training, following the implementation of t5-v1.1. The tokenizer is a SentencePieceUnigramTokenizer trained on the first 2M sentences of the Italian portion of the mC4 corpus. An improved version of the model trained on the Thoroughly Cleaned Italian mC4 Corpus (~41B words, ~275GB) is also available under the name gsarti/it5-base. The training procedure is made available on Github.

The following table summarizes the parameters for all available models

	`it5-small`	`it5-base`	`it5-large`	`it5-base-oscar` (this one)
`dataset`	`gsarti/clean_mc4_it`	`gsarti/clean_mc4_it`	`gsarti/clean_mc4_it`	`oscar/unshuffled_deduplicated_it`
`architecture`	`google/t5-v1_1-small`	`google/t5-v1_1-base`	`google/t5-v1_1-large`	`t5-base`
`learning rate`	5e-3	5e-3	5e-3	1e-2
`steps`	1'050'000	1'050'000	2'100'000	258'000
`training time`	36 hours	101 hours	370 hours	98 hours
`ff projection`	`gated-gelu`	`gated-gelu`	`gated-gelu`	`relu`
`tie embeds`	`false`	`false`	`false`	`true`
`optimizer`	adafactor	adafactor	adafactor	adafactor
`max seq. length`	512	512	512	512
`per-device batch size`	16	16	8	16
`tot. batch size`	128	128	64	128
`weigth decay`	1e-3	1e-3	1e-2	1e-3
`validation split size`	15K examples	15K examples	15K examples	15K examples

The high training time of it5-base-oscar was due to a bug in the training script.

For a list of individual model parameters, refer to the config.json file in the respective repositories.

Using the models

from transformers import T5Tokenizer, T5ForConditionalGeneration

tokenizer = T5Tokenizer.from_pretrained("gsarti/it5-base-oscar")
model = T5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("gsarti/it5-base-oscar")

Note: You will need to fine-tune the model on your downstream seq2seq task to use it. See an example here.

Flax and Tensorflow versions of the model are also available:

from transformers import FlaxT5ForConditionalGeneration, TFT5ForConditionalGeneration

model_flax = FlaxT5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("gsarti/it5-base-oscar")
model_tf = TFT5ForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("gsarti/it5-base-oscar")

Limitations

Due to the nature of the web-scraped corpus on which IT5 models were trained, it is likely that their usage could reproduce and amplify pre-existing biases in the data, resulting in potentially harmful content such as racial or gender stereotypes and conspiracist views. For this reason, the study of such biases is explicitly encouraged, and model usage should ideally be restricted to research-oriented and non-user-facing endeavors.

Model curators

For problems or updates on this model, please contact [email protected].

Citation Information

@article{sarti-nissim-2022-it5,
    title={IT5: Large-scale Text-to-text Pretraining for Italian Language Understanding and Generation},
    author={Sarti, Gabriele and Nissim, Malvina},
    journal={ArXiv preprint 2203.03759},
    url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.03759},
    year={2022},
    month={mar}
}

gsarti
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it5-base-oscar