Introduction

Fairseq(-py) is a sequence modeling toolkit that allows researchers and developers to train custom models for translation, summarization, language modeling and other text generation tasks. It provides reference implementations of various sequence-to-sequence models, including:

• Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN)
  • Dauphin et al. (2017): Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks
  • Gehring et al. (2017): Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning
  • Edunov et al. (2018): Classical Structured Prediction Losses for Sequence to Sequence Learning
  • Fan et al. (2018): Hierarchical Neural Story Generation
  • New wav2vec: Unsupervised Pre-training for Speech Recognition (Schneider et al., 2019)
• LightConv and DynamicConv models
  • New Wu et al. (2019): Pay Less Attention with Lightweight and Dynamic Convolutions
• Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks
  • Luong et al. (2015): Effective Approaches to Attention-based Neural Machine Translation
  • Wiseman and Rush (2016): Sequence-to-Sequence Learning as Beam-Search Optimization
• Transformer (self-attention) networks
  • Vaswani et al. (2017): Attention Is All You Need
  • Ott et al. (2018): Scaling Neural Machine Translation
  • Edunov et al. (2018): Understanding Back-Translation at Scale
  • New Baevski and Auli (2018): Adaptive Input Representations for Neural Language Modeling
  • New Shen et al. (2019): Mixture Models for Diverse Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade

Fairseq features:

• multi-GPU (distributed) training on one machine or across multiple machines
• fast generation on both CPU and GPU with multiple search algorithms implemented:
  • beam search
  • Diverse Beam Search (Vijayakumar et al., 2016)
  • sampling (unconstrained and top-k)
• large mini-batch training even on a single GPU via delayed updates
• mixed precision training (trains faster with less GPU memory on NVIDIA tensor cores)
• extensible: easily register new models, criterions, tasks, optimizers and learning rate schedulers

We also provide pre-trained models for several benchmark translation and language modeling datasets.

Requirements and Installation

• PyTorch version >= 1.0.0
• Python version >= 3.5
• For training new models, you'll also need an NVIDIA GPU and NCCL

Please follow the instructions here to install PyTorch: https://github.com/pytorch/pytorch#installation.

If you use Docker make sure to increase the shared memory size either with --ipc=host or --shm-size as command line options to nvidia-docker run.

After PyTorch is installed, you can install fairseq with pip:

pip install fairseq

Installing from source

To install fairseq from source and develop locally:

git clone https://github.com/pytorch/fairseq
cd fairseq
pip install --editable .

Improved training speed

Training speed can be further improved by installing NVIDIA's apex library with the --cuda_ext option. fairseq will automatically switch to the faster modules provided by apex.

Getting Started

The full documentation contains instructions for getting started, training new models and extending fairseq with new model types and tasks.

Pre-trained models and examples

We provide pre-trained models and pre-processed, binarized test sets for several tasks listed below, as well as example training and evaluation commands.

• Translation: convolutional and transformer models are available
• Language Modeling: convolutional models are available

We also have more detailed READMEs to reproduce results from specific papers:

• Schneider et al. (2019): wav2vec: Unsupervised Pre-training for Speech Recognition
• Shen et al. (2019) Mixture Models for Diverse Machine Translation: Tricks of the Trade
• Wu et al. (2019): Pay Less Attention with Lightweight and Dynamic Convolutions
• Edunov et al. (2018): Understanding Back-Translation at Scale
• Edunov et al. (2018): Classical Structured Prediction Losses for Sequence to Sequence Learning
• Fan et al. (2018): Hierarchical Neural Story Generation
• Ott et al. (2018): Scaling Neural Machine Translation
• Gehring et al. (2017): Convolutional Sequence to Sequence Learning
• Dauphin et al. (2017): Language Modeling with Gated Convolutional Networks

Join the fairseq community

• Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/fairseq.users
• Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/fairseq-users

License

fairseq(-py) is BSD-licensed. The license applies to the pre-trained models as well. We also provide an additional patent grant.

Citation

Please cite as:

@inproceedings{ott2019fairseq,
  title = {fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling},
  author = {Myle Ott and Sergey Edunov and Alexei Baevski and Angela Fan and Sam Gross and Nathan Ng and David Grangier and Michael Auli},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2019: Demonstrations},
  year = {2019},
}