transformers/docs/source/en/model_doc/nllb-moe.md

This model was published in HF papers on 2022-07-11 and contributed to Hugging Face Transformers on 2023-03-27.

NLLB-MOE

Overview

The NLLB model was presented in No Language Left Behind: Scaling Human-Centered Machine Translation by Marta R. Costa-jussà, James Cross, Onur Çelebi, Maha Elbayad, Kenneth Heafield, Kevin Heffernan, Elahe Kalbassi, Janice Lam, Daniel Licht, Jean Maillard, Anna Sun, Skyler Wang, Guillaume Wenzek, Al Youngblood, Bapi Akula, Loic Barrault, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Prangthip Hansanti, John Hoffman, Semarley Jarrett, Kaushik Ram Sadagopan, Dirk Rowe, Shannon Spruit, Chau Tran, Pierre Andrews, Necip Fazil Ayan, Shruti Bhosale, Sergey Edunov, Angela Fan, Cynthia Gao, Vedanuj Goswami, Francisco Guzmán, Philipp Koehn, Alexandre Mourachko, Christophe Ropers, Safiyyah Saleem, Holger Schwenk, and Jeff Wang.

The abstract of the paper is the following:

Driven by the goal of eradicating language barriers on a global scale, machine translation has solidified itself as a key focus of artificial intelligence research today. However, such efforts have coalesced around a small subset of languages, leaving behind the vast majority of mostly low-resource languages. What does it take to break the 200 language barrier while ensuring safe, high quality results, all while keeping ethical considerations in mind? In No Language Left Behind, we took on this challenge by first contextualizing the need for low-resource language translation support through exploratory interviews with native speakers. Then, we created datasets and models aimed at narrowing the performance gap between low and high-resource languages. More specifically, we developed a conditional compute model based on Sparsely Gated Mixture of Experts that is trained on data obtained with novel and effective data mining techniques tailored for low-resource languages. We propose multiple architectural and training improvements to counteract overfitting while training on thousands of tasks. Critically, we evaluated the performance of over 40,000 different translation directions using a human-translated benchmark, Flores-200, and combined human evaluation with a novel toxicity benchmark covering all languages in Flores-200 to assess translation safety. Our model achieves an improvement of 44% BLEU relative to the previous state-of-the-art, laying important groundwork towards realizing a universal translation system.

This model was contributed by Arthur Zucker. The original code can be found here.

Usage tips

• M2M100ForConditionalGeneration is the base model for both NLLB and NLLB MoE
• The NLLB-MoE is very similar to the NLLB model, but it's feed forward layer is based on the implementation of SwitchTransformers.
• The tokenizer is the same as the NLLB models.

Implementation differences with SwitchTransformers

The biggest difference is the way the tokens are routed. NLLB-MoE uses a top-2-gate which means that for each input, only the top two experts are selected based on the highest predicted probabilities from the gating network, and the remaining experts are ignored. In SwitchTransformers, only the top-1 probabilities are computed, which means that tokens have less probability of being forwarded. Moreover, if a token is not routed to any expert, SwitchTransformers still adds its unmodified hidden states (kind of like a residual connection) while they are masked in NLLB's top-2 routing mechanism.

Generating with NLLB-MoE

The available checkpoints require around 350GB of storage. Make sure to use accelerate if you do not have enough RAM on your machine.

While generating the target text set the forced_bos_token_id to the target language id. The following example shows how to translate English to French using the facebook/nllb-200-distilled-600M model.

Note that we're using the BCP-47 code for French fra_Latn. See here for the list of all BCP-47 in the Flores 200 dataset.

from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer


tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("facebook/nllb-moe-54b")
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained("facebook/nllb-moe-54b", device_map="auto")

article = "Previously, Ring's CEO, Jamie Siminoff, remarked the company started when his doorbell wasn't audible from his shop in his garage."
inputs = tokenizer(article, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

translated_tokens = model.generate(
    **inputs, forced_bos_token_id=tokenizer.lang_code_to_id["fra_Latn"], max_length=50
)
tokenizer.batch_decode(translated_tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]
"Auparavant, le PDG de Ring, Jamie Siminoff, a fait remarquer que la société avait commencé lorsque sa sonnette n'était pas audible depuis son magasin dans son garage."

Generating from any other language than English

English (eng_Latn) is set as the default language from which to translate. In order to specify that you'd like to translate from a different language, you should specify the BCP-47 code in the src_lang keyword argument of the tokenizer initialization.

See example below for a translation from romanian to german:

from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer


tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("facebook/nllb-moe-54b", src_lang="ron_Latn")
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained("facebook/nllb-moe-54b", device_map="auto")

article = "Şeful ONU spune că nu există o soluţie militară în Siria"
inputs = tokenizer(article, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

translated_tokens = model.generate(
    **inputs, forced_bos_token_id=tokenizer.lang_code_to_id["deu_Latn"], max_length=30
)
tokenizer.batch_decode(translated_tokens, skip_special_tokens=True)[0]

Resources

• Translation task guide
• Summarization task guide

NllbMoeConfig

autodoc NllbMoeConfig

NllbMoeTop2Router

autodoc NllbMoeTop2Router - route_tokens - forward

NllbMoeSparseMLP

autodoc NllbMoeSparseMLP - forward

NllbMoeModel

autodoc NllbMoeModel - forward

NllbMoeForConditionalGeneration

autodoc NllbMoeForConditionalGeneration - forward