[D] Apple's ane-transformers - experiences?

Submitted by alkibijad t3_10raouh in MachineLearning

I'm using Huggingface's transformers regularly for experimentations, but I plan to deploy some of the models to iOS.

I have found ml-ane-transformers repo from Apple, which shows how transformers can be rewritten to have much better performance on Apple's devices. There's an example of DistilBERT implemented in that optimized way.

As I plan to deploy transformers to iOS, I started thinking about this. I'm hoping some already have experience about this, so we can discuss:

  • Has anyone tried this themselves? Do they actually see the improvements in performance on iOS?
  • I'm using Huggingface's transformer models in my experiments. How much work do you think there is to rewrite model in this optimized way?
  • It's very difficult to train transformers from scratch (especially if they're big :) ), so I'm fine-tuning on top of pre-trained models on Huggingface. Is it possible to use weights from pretrained Huggingface models with the Apple's reference code? How difficult is it?
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TheDeviousPanda t1_j6vv0my wrote

I hate to do this to you, but I have been in your position and I have answers to all your questions.

  • Yes, yes
  • A lot
  • Yes, very
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alkibijad OP t1_j6w7lo3 wrote

Replying to TheDeviousPanda (#1,701,621)

That was not the answer I was hoping for, but very helpful :)
Do you have any code/repo to share? I'm only able to find the DistilBERT implementation in apple's repo, would like to see some other examples?

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vade t1_j6xeylg wrote

FWIW, a colleague of mine is working on this, and is also hitting some hiccups. Ive pointed them to this thread :)

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Competitive-Rub-1958 t1_j6z8a7t wrote

Replying to TheDeviousPanda (#1,701,621)

For someone who simply wants to use ANE (haven't bought it, just considering) for testing out bare-bones models locally (I find remotely debugging quite frustrating) for research purposes before finally training them on cloud, how good is the support with Containerization solutions like Singularity - does it even leverage ANE?

I know the speedup won't really be anything drastic, but if it helps (is faster and more resource efficient than the CPU/GPU) then that just translates to a lower time-to-iterate anyways...

So for someone using plain PyTorch (w/ a bells and whistles), how much of a pain would it be?

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