EasyTransfer: A Simple and Scalable Deep Transfer Learning Platform for NLP Applications

  • Minghui Qiu
  • , Peng Li
  • , Chengyu Wang
  • , Haojie Pan
  • , Ang Wang
  • , Cen Chen
  • , Xianyan Jia
  • , Yaliang Li
  • , Jun Huang
  • , Deng Cai
  • , Wei Lin

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

The literature has witnessed the success of leveraging Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and Transfer Learning (TL) algorithms to a wide range of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications, yet it is not easy to build an easy-to-use and scalable TL toolkit for this purpose. To bridge this gap, the EasyTransfer platform is designed to develop deep TL algorithms for NLP applications. EasyTransfer is backended with a high-performance and scalable engine for efficient training and inference, and also integrates comprehensive deep TL algorithms, to make the development of industrial-scale TL applications easier. In EasyTransfer, the built-in data and model parallelism strategies, combined with AI compiler optimization, show to be 4.0x faster than the community version of distributed training. EasyTransfer supports various NLP models in the ModelZoo, including mainstream PLMs and multi-modality models. It also features various in-house developed TL algorithms, together with the AppZoo for NLP applications. The toolkit is convenient for users to quickly start model training, evaluation, and online deployment. EasyTransfer is currently deployed at Alibaba to support a variety of business scenarios, including item recommendation, personalized search, conversational question answering, etc. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets and online applications show that EasyTransfer is suitable for online production with cutting-edge performance for various applications. The source code of EasyTransfer is released at Github1.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCIKM 2021 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages4075-4084
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781450384469
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 Oct 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2021 - Virtual, Online, Australia
Duration: 1 Nov 20215 Nov 2021

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings
ISSN (Print)2155-0751

Conference

Conference30th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2021
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityVirtual, Online
Period1/11/215/11/21

Keywords

  • natural language processing
  • pre-trained language model
  • transfer learning

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