PyTorch implementation of Google AI's BERT model

Introduction

This is an op-for-op PyTorch reimplementation of the TensorFlow code released by Google AI with the paper BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding.

This PyTorch implementation can load any pre-trained TensorFlow BERT checkpoint in the PyTorch model (see below).

There are a few differences with the TensorFlow model:

• the PyTorch model has multi-GPU and distributed training capabilities (see below),
• there is not TPU support in the current stable version of PyTorch (0.4.1) and as a consequence, the pre-training script are not included in this repo. TPU support is supposed to be available in PyTorch v1.0 that will be released in the coming weeks. We will update the repository with TPU-adapted pre-training scripts when PyTorch will have TPU support. In the meantime, you can use the TensorFlow version to train a model on TPU and import the checkpoint using the following script.

Loading a TensorFlow checkpoint (in particular Google's pre-trained models) in the Pytorch model

You can convert any TensorFlow checkpoint, and in particular the pre-trained weights released by GoogleAI, by using convert_tf_checkpoint_to_pytorch.py.

This script takes as input a TensorFlow checkpoint (bert_model.ckpt) load it in the PyTorch model and save the model in a standard PyTorch model save file that can be imported using the usual torch.load() command (see the run_classifier.py script for an example).

TensorFlow pre-trained models can be found in the original TensorFlow code. Here is an example of the conversion process for a pre-trained BERT-Base Uncased model:

export BERT_BASE_DIR=/path/to/bert/uncased_L-12_H-768_A-12

python convert_tf_checkpoint_to_pytorch.py \
  --tf_checkpoint_path=$BERT_BASE_DIR/bert_model.ckpt \
  --bert_config_file=$BERT_BASE_DIR/bert_config.json \
  --pytorch_dump_path=$BERT_BASE_DIR/pytorch_model.bin

Fine-tuning with BERT: running the examples

We showcase the same examples as in the original implementation: fine-tuning on the MRPC classification corpus and the question answering dataset SQUAD.

Before running theses examples you should download the GLUE data by running this script and unpack it to some directory $GLUE_DIR. Please also download the BERT-Base checkpoint, unzip it to some directory $BERT_BASE_DIR, and convert it to its PyTorch version as explained in the previous section.

This example code fine-tunes BERT-Base on the Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MRPC) corpus and runs in less than 10 minutes on a single K-80.

export GLUE_DIR=/path/to/glue

python run_classifier.py \
  --task_name MRPC \
  --do_train \
  --do_eval \
  --do_lower_case \
  --data_dir $GLUE_DIR/MRPC/ \
  --vocab_file $BERT_BASE_DIR/vocab.txt \
  --bert_config_file $BERT_BASE_DIR/bert_config.json \
  --init_checkpoint $BERT_PYTORCH_DIR/pytorch_model.bin \
  --max_seq_length 128 \
  --train_batch_size 32 \
  --learning_rate 2e-5 \
  --num_train_epochs 3.0 \
  --output_dir /tmp/mrpc_output/

The next example fine-tunes BERT-Base on the SQuAD question answering task.

The data for SQuAD can be downloaded with the following links and should be saved in a $SQUAD_DIR directory.

• train-v1.1.json
• dev-v1.1.json
• evaluate-v1.1.py

export SQUAD_DIR=/path/to/SQUAD

python run_squad.py \
  --vocab_file=$BERT_BASE_DIR/vocab.txt \
  --bert_config_file=$BERT_BASE_DIR/bert_config.json \
  --init_checkpoint=$BERT_PYTORCH_DIR/pytorch_model.bin \
  --do_train \
  --train_file=$SQUAD_DIR/train-v1.1.json \
  --do_predict \
  --predict_file=$SQUAD_DIR/dev-v1.1.json \
  --train_batch_size=12 \
  --learning_rate=5e-5 \
  --num_train_epochs=2.0 \
  --max_seq_length=384 \
  --doc_stride=128 \
  --output_dir=../debug_squad/

Comparing TensorFlow and PyTorch models

We also include a small Notebook we used to verify that the conversion of the weights to PyTorch are consistent with the original TensorFlow weights. Please follow the instructions in the Notebook to run it.

Note on pre-training

The original TensorFlow code also release two scripts for pre-training BERT: create_pretraining_data.py and run_pretraining.py. As the authors notice, pre-training BERT is particularly expensive and requires TPU to run in a reasonable amout of time (see here).

We have decided not to port these scripts for now and wait for the TPU support on PyTorch (see the recent official announcement).

Requirements

The main dependencies of this code are:

• PyTorch (>= 0.4.0)
• tqdm

To install the dependencies:

pip install -r ./requirements.txt