Title
EasyTransfer: A Simple and Scalable Deep Transfer Learning Platform for NLP Applications
Abstract
ABSTRACTThe 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3459637.3481911
Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
11
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Minghui Qiu159334.84
Peng Li281.57
Chengyu Wang33013.35
Haojie Pan401.01
Ang Wang500.34
Chen Cen616225.61
Xianyan Jia700.34
yaliang li862950.87
Jun Huang97711.67
Deng Cai107938320.26
Wei Lin1122924.46