7.2 KiB
MarianMT
Overview
MarianMT is a machine translation model trained with the Marian framework which is written in pure C++. The framework includes its own custom auto-differentiation engine and efficient meta-algorithms to train encoder-decoder models like BART.
All MarianMT models are transformer encoder-decoders with 6 layers in each component, use static sinusoidal positional embeddings, don't have a layernorm embedding, and the model starts generating with the prefix pad_token_id instead of <s/>.
You can find all the original MarianMT checkpoints under the Language Technology Research Group at the University of Helsinki organization.
Tip
This model was contributed by sshleifer.
Click on the MarianMT models in the right sidebar for more examples of how to apply MarianMT to translation tasks.
The example below demonstrates how to translate text using [Pipeline] or the [AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM] class.
from transformers import pipeline
translator = pipeline("translation_en_to_de", model="Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-de")
result = translator("Hello, how are you?")
print(result)
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer
model_name = "Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-de"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(model_name)
inputs = tokenizer("Hello, how are you?", return_tensors="pt")
outputs = model.generate(**inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
Not supported for this model.
Quantization
Quantization reduces the memory burden of large models by representing the weights in a lower precision. Refer to the Quantization overview for more available quantization backends.
The example below uses dynamic quantization to only quantize the weights to INT8.
from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch
model_name = "Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-de"
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(model_name)
quantized_model = torch.quantization.quantize_dynamic(
model, {torch.nn.Linear}, dtype=torch.qint8
)
inputs = tokenizer("Hello, how are you?", return_tensors="pt")
outputs = quantized_model.generate(**inputs)
print(tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True))
Attention Mask Visualizer Support
Use the AttentionMaskVisualizer to better understand what tokens the model can and cannot attend to.
from transformers.utils.attention_visualizer import AttentionMaskVisualizer
visualizer = AttentionMaskVisualizer("Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-de")
visualizer("Hello, how are you?")
Supported Languages
All models follow the naming convention: Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-{src}-{tgt}, where src is the source language code and tgt is the target language code.
The list of supported languages and codes is available in each model card.
Some models are multilingual; for example, opus-mt-en-ROMANCE translates English to multiple Romance languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc.).
Newer models use 3-character language codes, e.g., >>fra<< for French, >>por<< for Portuguese.
Older models use 2-character or region-specific codes like es_AR (Spanish from Argentina).
Example of translating English to multiple Romance languages:
from transformers import MarianMTModel, MarianTokenizer
src_text = [
">>fra<< This is a sentence in English to translate to French.",
">>por<< This should go to Portuguese.",
">>spa<< And this to Spanish."
]
model_name = "Helsinki-NLP/opus-mt-en-roa"
tokenizer = MarianTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_name)
model = MarianMTModel.from_pretrained(model_name)
inputs = tokenizer(src_text, return_tensors="pt", padding=True)
outputs = model.generate(**inputs)
result = [tokenizer.decode(t, skip_special_tokens=True) for t in outputs]
print(result)
Notes
-
MarianMT models are smaller than many other translation models, enabling faster inference, low memory usage, and suitability for CPU environments.
-
Based on Transformer encoder-decoder architecture with 6 layers each.
-
Originally trained with the Marian C++ framework for efficiency.
Resources
- Marian Research Paper: Marian: Fast Neural Machine Translation in C++
- MarianMT Model Collection: Helsinki-NLP on Hugging Face
- Marian Official Framework: Marian-NMT GitHub
- Language Codes Reference: ISO 639-1 Language Codes
- Translation Task Guide: Hugging Face Translation Guide
- Quantization Overview: Transformers Quantization Docs
- Tokenizer Guide: Hugging Face Tokenizer Documentation
- Model Conversion Tool: convert_marian_to_pytorch.py (GitHub)
- Supported Language Pairs: Refer to individual model cards under Helsinki-NLP for supported languages.