Distilbert Base Uncased Distilled Squad

Distilled QA model

Have you ever wondered how AI models can be both powerful and efficient? The Distilbert Base Uncased Distilled Squad model is a great example. This model is a fine-tuned version of the DistilBERT-base-uncased model, specifically designed for question answering tasks. What makes it unique is that it's 40% smaller and 60% faster than the original BERT model, while still maintaining over 95% of its performance. This means you can get accurate answers quickly, without sacrificing too much in terms of model size. The model is trained on a large dataset, including the SQuAD v1.1 dataset, and has been shown to achieve a high F1 score of 86.9 on the dev set. Whether you're building a chatbot or just need to answer questions efficiently, this model is definitely worth considering.

Distilbert apache-2.0 Updated a year ago

Table of Contents

Model Overview

The DistilBERT base uncased distilled SQuAD model is a smaller, faster, and more efficient version of the popular BERT model. It’s designed to answer questions based on a given text. Think of it like a super-smart robot that can quickly find the answers to your questions!

Here are some key features of this model:

  • Small but mighty: It has 40% fewer parameters than the original BERT model, making it faster and more efficient.
  • Fast and accurate: It runs 60% faster than BERT while preserving over 95% of its performance.
  • Question answering: This model is specifically fine-tuned for question answering tasks, making it perfect for applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, or search engines.

Capabilities

This model is a powerful tool for question answering. It can:

  • Answer questions based on a given text
  • Extract relevant information from a passage
  • Provide accurate and informative responses

What can it do?

  • It uses a technique called knowledge distillation to learn from the BERT model and fine-tune its performance on the SQuAD v1.1 dataset.
  • This allows it to achieve high accuracy and efficiency in question answering tasks.

Key features

  • Small and efficient architecture
  • Fast performance
  • High accuracy on question answering tasks
  • Fine-tuned on the SQuAD v1.1 dataset

Example use cases

  • Question answering systems
  • Chatbots
  • Virtual assistants
  • Text summarization and extraction tools

Comparison to Other Models

The DistilBERT base uncased distilled SQuAD model outperforms other models in its class, such as the BERT base uncased model, in terms of efficiency and accuracy. However, it may not perform as well as larger models like the BERT large uncased model on certain tasks.

ModelParametersSpeedF1 Score
Current Model40% fewer than BERT base60% faster than BERT base86.9
BERT base--88.5
Examples
What is the name of the dataset used for fine-tuning this model? SQuAD v1.1
Who is sitting next to Alice? Bob
What is the task of extracting an answer from a text given a question? Extractive Question Answering

Example Use Cases

This model can be used for a variety of tasks, including:

  • Question answering: It can be used to answer questions based on a given context.
  • Text classification: It can be used to classify text into different categories.
  • Sentiment analysis: It can be used to analyze the sentiment of text.

Here is an example of how to use this model in PyTorch:

from transformers import DistilBertTokenizer, DistilBertForQuestionAnswering
import torch

tokenizer = DistilBertTokenizer.from_pretrained('distilbert-base-uncased-distilled-squad')
model = DistilBertForQuestionAnswering.from_pretrained('distilbert-base-uncased-distilled-squad')

question, text = "Who was Jim Henson?", "Jim Henson was a nice puppet"
inputs = tokenizer(question, text, return_tensors="pt")

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)

answer_start_index = torch.argmax(outputs.start_logits)
answer_end_index = torch.argmax(outputs.end_logits)
predict_answer_tokens = inputs.input_ids[0, answer_start_index : answer_end_index + 1]
tokenizer.decode(predict_answer_tokens)

And here is an example of how to use this model in TensorFlow:

from transformers import DistilBertTokenizer, TFDistilBertForQuestionAnswering
import tensorflow as tf

tokenizer = DistilBertTokenizer.from_pretrained("distilbert-base-uncased-distilled-squad")
model = TFDistilBertForQuestionAnswering.from_pretrained("distilbert-base-uncased-distilled-squad")

question, text = "Who was Jim Henson?", "Jim Henson was a nice puppet"
inputs = tokenizer(question, text, return_tensors="tf")

outputs = model(**inputs)

answer_start_index = int(tf.math.argmax(outputs.start_logits, axis=-1)[0])
answer_end_index = int(tf.math.argmax(outputs.end_logits, axis=-1)[0])
predict_answer_tokens = inputs.input_ids[0, answer_start_index : answer_end_index + 1]
tokenizer.decode(predict_answer_tokens)

Risks and Limitations

While this model is powerful, it’s not perfect. It can:

  • Perpetuate biases: Like many language models, it can reflect and amplify existing biases in the data it was trained on.
  • Generate disturbing content: It can produce answers that are disturbing or offensive, so use it with caution!

Remember to always use this model responsibly and be aware of its limitations.

How to Get Started

Want to try out this model? You can use the following code to get started:

from transformers import pipeline
question_answerer = pipeline("question-answering", model='distilbert-base-uncased-distilled-squad')

You can also use it in PyTorch or TensorFlow by importing the necessary libraries and loading the model.

Dataloop's AI Development Platform
Build end-to-end workflows

Build end-to-end workflows

Dataloop is a complete AI development stack, allowing you to make data, elements, models and human feedback work together easily.

  • Use one centralized tool for every step of the AI development process.
  • Import data from external blob storage, internal file system storage or public datasets.
  • Connect to external applications using a REST API & a Python SDK.
Save, share, reuse

Save, share, reuse

Every single pipeline can be cloned, edited and reused by other data professionals in the organization. Never build the same thing twice.

  • Use existing, pre-created pipelines for RAG, RLHF, RLAF, Active Learning & more.
  • Deploy multi-modal pipelines with one click across multiple cloud resources.
  • Use versions for your pipelines to make sure the deployed pipeline is the stable one.
Easily manage pipelines

Easily manage pipelines

Spend less time dealing with the logistics of owning multiple data pipelines, and get back to building great AI applications.

  • Easy visualization of the data flow through the pipeline.
  • Identify & troubleshoot issues with clear, node-based error messages.
  • Use scalable AI infrastructure that can grow to support massive amounts of data.