DistilBERT

This model was released on 2019-10-02 and added to Hugging Face Transformers on 2020-11-16.

DistilBERT

DistilBERT is pretrained by knowledge distillation to create a smaller model with faster inference and requires less compute to train. Through a triple loss objective during pretraining, language modeling loss, distillation loss, cosine-distance loss, DistilBERT demonstrates similar performance to a larger transformer language model.

You can find all the original DistilBERT checkpoints under the DistilBERT organization.

Tip

Click on the DistilBERT models in the right sidebar for more examples of how to apply DistilBERT to different language tasks.

The example below demonstrates how to classify text with Pipeline, AutoModel, and from the command line.

from transformers import pipeline

classifier = pipeline(
    task="text-classification",
    model="distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english",
    dtype=torch.float16,
    device=0
)

result = classifier("I love using Hugging Face Transformers!")
print(result)
# Output: [{'label': 'POSITIVE', 'score': 0.9998}]

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForSequenceClassification, AutoTokenizer

tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(
    "distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english",
)
model = AutoModelForSequenceClassification.from_pretrained(
    "distilbert/distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english",
    dtype=torch.float16,
    device_map="auto",
    attn_implementation="sdpa"
)
inputs = tokenizer("I love using Hugging Face Transformers!", return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)

with torch.no_grad():
    outputs = model(**inputs)

predicted_class_id = torch.argmax(outputs.logits, dim=-1).item()
predicted_label = model.config.id2label[predicted_class_id]
print(f"Predicted label: {predicted_label}")

echo -e "I love using Hugging Face Transformers!" | transformers run --task text-classification --model distilbert-base-uncased-finetuned-sst-2-english

Notes

• DistilBERT doesn’t have token_type_ids, you don’t need to indicate which token belongs to which segment. Just separate your segments with the separation token tokenizer.sep_token (or [SEP]).
• DistilBERT doesn’t have options to select the input positions (position_ids input). This could be added if necessary though, just let us know if you need this option.

DistilBertConfig

[[autodoc]] DistilBertConfig

DistilBertTokenizer

[[autodoc]] DistilBertTokenizer

DistilBertTokenizerFast

[[autodoc]] DistilBertTokenizerFast

DistilBertModel

[[autodoc]] DistilBertModel - forward

DistilBertForMaskedLM

[[autodoc]] DistilBertForMaskedLM - forward

DistilBertForSequenceClassification

[[autodoc]] DistilBertForSequenceClassification - forward

DistilBertForMultipleChoice

[[autodoc]] DistilBertForMultipleChoice - forward

DistilBertForTokenClassification

[[autodoc]] DistilBertForTokenClassification - forward

DistilBertForQuestionAnswering

[[autodoc]] DistilBertForQuestionAnswering - forward