[Paper] | TLDR | Motivation | Setup | Pre-training | Fine-tuning | Extras | Conclusions | References | Cite | Issues

This repository comprises the code to reproduce the pre-training of a "Large Language Model" (T5) under a limited budget (1xA100 GPU, < 24 hours) in PyTorch. We start from the randomly initialised T5-base-v1.1 (248M parameters) model, and we pre-train it on the English subset of the C4 dataset and then fine-tune it on Super-Natural Instructions (SNI) benchmark.

In ~16 hours on a single GPU, we achieve 40.7 RougeL on the SNI test set, compared to 40.9 RougeL of the original model weights available on HuggingFace Hub and pretrained on 150x more data through "a combination of model and data parallelism [...] on slices of Cloud TPU Pods", each with 1024 TPUs.

Our core contribution is not the T5 model itself, which follows the HuggingFace implementation. Instead, we optimise everything else in the training pipeline to offer you a user-friendly starting template for your NLP application/research. Most importantly, we show that it is possible to pre-train the T5 model to the top performance under a limited budget in PyTorch.

Despite the continuously increasing size of pretrained Transformers, the research community still needs easy-to-reproduce and up-to-date baselines to test new research hypotheses fast and at a small scale.

A recent effort from Andrej Karpathy, the nanoGPT repository, enables researchers to pre-train and fine-tune GPT-style (Decoder-only) language models. On the other hand, Cramming opts to find the optimal BERT-style (Encoder-only) pre-training setup for limited-compute settings.

With nanoT5, we want to fill a gap (Community requests: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5) of an accessible research template to pre-train and fine-tune T5-style (Encoder-Decoder) model. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first attempt to reproduce T5 v1.1 pre-training in PyTorch (previously available implementations are in Jax/Flax).

We created this repository for people who want to pre-train T5-style models by themselves and evaluate their performance on downstream tasks. This could be for a variety of reasons:

• You are a researcher in academia with limited compute (like me), and you came up with a promising idea based on the T5 model, so you need a pipeline to evaluate it;
• You have an in-house dataset that you think is more appropriate than the original pre-training dataset (C4) for your downstream task;
• You want to experiment with continued pre-training or want to build on the T5 pre-training objective.

If you don't need to pre-train the T5 model, you'd be better off downloading the weights from HuggingFace Hub. Our checkpoints are worse because we work under limited compute.

In this project, we expose (for research purposes) and optimise everything in the training pipeline of T5, except from the model implementation. We include the simplified implementation of T5 model (which is great for teaching & learning purposes), however, we do not optimize it with the latest techniques like tensor or pipeline parallelism, because it makes the code much more complex and is not needed at a small scale. Most importantly, we base our code on PyTorch, since access to TPUs is limited. Key features:

• Dataset: Downloading and preprocessing of the C4 dataset happens in parallel with the training of the model. The C4 dataset is > 300GB, so it takes a couple of hours to download it and even longer to preprocess it. This codebase does it on the fly without any detrimental effect on the training time and performance (we haven't observed it, although it might happen with an old CPU (< 8 core) or a slow internet connection). As a result, you can initiate pre-training of your own T5 model within minutes.
• Model Optimizer / LR Scheduler: The original T5 uses a memory-efficient Adafactor optimizer. A study on pre-training T5, on the other hand, reports that training does not converge with AdamW which we find strange given that AdamW relies on theoretically better approximations than Adafactor. We analysed the source of this discrepancy with several ablations. Although there are many subtle differences between Adafactor and AdamW, what ensures the Adafactor convergence is matrix-wise LR scaling by its root mean square (RMS). We augmented the AdamW implementation by RMS scaling and observed that it becomes more stable during pre-training, achieves better validation loss, and is faster.
• Exposure and simplicity: We try to balance the implementation of the training pipeline by keeping it customisable while retaining a sufficient level of abstraction. We use the HuggingFace Accelerator to implement operations like Checkpoint Saving, Gradient Accumulation, Gradient Clipping, and moving tensors to the correct devices. We use neptune.ai for experiment tracking and hydra for hyperparameters. Additionally, we expose a simplified implementation of the T5 model, training loop, data preprocessing, etc.
• Efficiency: We use mixed-precision training (TF32 & BF16), PyTorch 2.0 compile, and utilise all optimisations listed in established optimisation tutorials #1 #2.

git clone https://github.com/PiotrNawrot/nanoT5.git
cd nanoT5
conda create -n nanoT5 python=3.8
conda activate nanoT5
pip install -r requirements.txt

The following commands result in the following pip freeze as of 18.06.2023.

We also include our lscpu and nvidia-smi.

The T5 v1.1 authors report 1.942 negative log-likelihood (NLL) on the held-out set of C4 after after 2^16 steps.

We follow the original experimental setup for pre-training, including Dataset (C4), Training Objective (Span Filling), Model Architecture (T5-Base), Optimizer (Adafactor), and LR Schedule (Inverse-Square-Root).

Our negative log-likelihood on the held-out set is 1.995, slightly worse than the reference.

We also experiment with the AdamW optimizer (instead of the original Adafactor) as it (theoretically) should offer more stability during training. Instead of using a low-rank approximation for the second moment of the gradients, it estimates it directly by storing the moving average for each parameter in memory. However, training diverges with AdamW, similar to this study on T5 pre-training. Through several ablations, we found that matrix-wise LR scaling by its root mean square (RMS) is responsible for the convergence of Adafactor. We augmented the AdamW implementation by RMS scaling and observed that it converges, becomes more stable during pre-training, and is slightly faster (it retrieves the second moment directly from memory instead of approximating it via matrix multiplications).

However, AdamW, when paired with the Inverse-Square-Root LR schedule, performs worse than Adafactor. For our final experiment, we replace ISR with Cosine LR Schedule. We achieve 1.953 negative log-likelihood on the held-out set and significantly outperform Adafactor with ISR schedule. We consider this our default pre-training config.

To reproduce any of the experiments mentioned above choose any combination of hyperparameters as follows:

python -m nanoT5.main \
    optim.name={adafactor,adamwscale} \
    optim.lr_scheduler={legacy,cosine}

We recommend adding model.compile=true flag for pre-training, if you are able to install PyTorch 2.0.

Suppose you don't have access to a 80GB A100 GPU. In that case, you can increase the number of gradient accumulation steps by optim.grad_acc=steps, where batch_size has to be divisible by steps.

The summary of the optimization process is printed every 100 steps in the following format. For instance:

[train] Step 100 out of 65536 | Loss --> 59.881 | Grad_l2 --> 61.126 | Weights_l2 --> 7042.931 | Lr --> 0.010 | Seconds_per_step --> 1.385 |

Below we include the efficiency statistics for our pre-training experiments. We report the time it takes to pre-train the model for 1 pre-training step and the total pre-training time according to the default config. Please note that we need to increase the optim.grad_acc steps to fit the model in precision different from BF16.

To fine-tune our model, we use the popular meta-dataset called Super Natural-Instructions (SNI), which aggregates datasets for many tasks. This meta-dataset was used to fine-tune many of the recent LLMs, e.g. FlanT5, BLOOM, and Tk-Instruct. While FlanT5 and BLOOM use other corpora in addition to SNI, Tk-Instruct's pipeline consists of starting from the pre-trained T5 model and fine-tuning it solely on SNI.

In this repository, we reproduce the Tk-Instruct fine-tuning results and follow their pipeline to evaluate our pre-trained model.

git clone https://github.com/allenai/natural-instructions.git data

We strictly follow the fine-tuning config of Tk-Instruct. It remains unclear whether Tk-Instruct was initialised from a regular checkpoint (google/t5-v1_1-base) or the one adapted explicitly for Language Modelling with continued training (google/t5-base-lm-adapt). Therefore, we decided to evaluate both. Run the following command to reproduce the Tk-Instruct experiments:

python -m nanoT5.main task=ft \
    model.name={google/t5-v1_1-base,google/t5-base-lm-adapt} \
    model.random_init={true,false} \
    model.checkpoint_path={"","/path/to/pytorch_model.bin"}

Setting model.random_init=false model.checkpoint_path="" corresponds to downloading pre-trained weights from HuggingFace Hub.

Setting model.random_init=false model.checkpoint_path="/path/to/pytorch_model.bin" corresponds to using the weights pre-trained with nanoT5.

Setting model.random_init=true model.checkpoint_path="" corresponds to a random initialisation.

In the figure below, we compare the performance of the model trained in this repository under different time budgets (4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24 hours) with the original T5-base-v1.1 model weights available through Huggingface Hub and its version adapted for Language Modelling (google/t5-base-lm-adapt). We observe that model trained in our repository for 16 hours on a single GPU is only 0.2 RougeL worse on average than the original T5-base-v1.1 model, despite being pre-trained on 150x less data (According to the T5 paper, they pre-train their models for one million steps with a batch size 2048. Our 16 hours config does 53332 steps with a batch size 256). Checkpoint explicitly adapted for Language Modelling (google/t5-base-lm-adapt) performs better than the original T5-base-v1.1 model and our model, however, this goes beyond the scope of this repository.

We share the model's weights after pre-training for 24 hours on HuggingFace Hub, which you can download and fine-tune on SNI using nanoT5. We also share the fine-tuning loss curves.

A single Fine-tuning step takes ~0.18s, and full Fine-tuning takes ~1 hour.

• Different optimizers: We tried the most recent optimizers like Lion, Sophia, however, none of them worked better than AdamW with RMS scaling.
• Positional embeddings: We tried to replace T5's learned relative positional embeddings with ALiBi. Possible benefits include a reduction of parameters and faster training & inference. Furthermore, if ALiBi worked we could add Flash Attention, which currently supports only non-parametric bias (T5 bias is trainable). However, with ALiBi the training was less stable and it had worse pre-training loss.
• FP16 precision: All experiments with FP16 precision diverged across different seeds

We show that it is possible to successfully pre-train a "Large Language Model" (T5) under a limited budget (1xA100 GPU, < 24 hours) in PyTorch. We make our codebase, configs and training logs publicly available to enhance the accessibility of NLP research. We are keen to hear your suggestions to improve the codebase further.

Thanks to Edoardo Maria Ponti for his feedback!

• T5 paper
• T5 v1.1 paper
• Super-Natural Instructions paper
• HuggingFace Flax Script
• Karpathy's nanoGPT
• Instruct-GPT codebase (Super-Natural Instructions)
• Blog about pre-training Dutch T5 in HuggingFace

If you found the repository useful consider citing the paper about this work.

@article{Nawrot2023nanoT5AP,
  title={nanoT5: A PyTorch Framework for Pre-training and Fine-tuning T5-style Models with Limited Resources},
  author={Piotr Nawrot},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2023},
  volume={abs/2309.02373},
}

Below you can also find an excellent work which uses nanoT5 for their experiments.

@article{Kaddour2023NoTN,
  title={No Train No Gain: Revisiting Efficient Training Algorithms For Transformer-based Language Models},
  author={Jean Kaddour and Oscar Key and Piotr Nawrot and Pasquale Minervini and Matt J. Kusner},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2023},
  volume={abs/2307.06440},
}

If you have any questions, feel free to raise a Github issue or contact me directly at: piotr.nawrot@ed.ac.uk