Using Torch Ranker Agent¶

Authors: Emily Dinan

TorchRankerAgent is an abstract parent class for PyTorch models that rank possible responses from a set of possible candidates. It inherits from TorchAgent and contains boilerplate code for training and evaluating ranking models.

Example Models¶

Several existing models in ParlAI inherit from TorchRankerAgent. Try some of the examples below:

Train a Bag-of-words Ranker model on ConvAI2:

parlai train_model --model examples/tra  --task convai2 --model-file /tmp/test --batchsize 32

Train a Transformer Ranker model on ConvAI2:

parlai train_model --model transformer/ranker --task convai2 --model-file /tmp/tr_convai2_test

Train a Memory Network model on Daily Dialog:

parlai train_model --model memnn --task dailydialog --model-file /tmp/memnn_dd_test --batchsize 20 --candidates batch --eval-candidates batch

Train a BERT-based Bi-Encoder ranker model on Twitter:

parlai train_model --model bert_ranker/bi_encoder_ranker --task twitter --model-file /tmp/bert_twitter_test --batchsize 10 --candidates batch --eval-candidates batch --data-parallel True

Creating a Model¶

In order to write a ranking model that inherits from TorchRankerAgent, you must implement the following functions: (An example is available at parlai/agents/examples/tra.py)

def score_candidates(self, batch, cand_vecs, cand_encs=None):
    """This function takes in a Batch object as well as a Tensor of
    candidate vectors. It must return a list of scores corresponding to
    the likelihood that the candidate vector at that index is the
    proper response. If `cand_encs` is not None (when we cache the
    encoding of the candidate vectors), you may use these instead of
    calling self.model on `cand_vecs`.
    """
    pass

def build_model(self):
    """This function is required to build the model and assign to the
    object `self.model`.
    """
    pass

Training a Model¶

Setting `--candidates`¶

This flag is used to determine which candidates to rank during training. There are several options:

Possible sources of candidates include batch, batch-all-cands, inline, and fixed.

batch – Use all labels in the batch as the candidate set (with all but the example’s label being treated as negatives).

:::{note} Note With this setting, the candidate set is identical for all examples in a batch. This option may be undesirable if it is possible for duplicate labels to occur in a batch, since the second instance of the correct label will be treated as a negative. :::
batch-all-cands – Use all inline candidates in the batch as candidate set.

:::{warning} Warning This can result in a very large number of candidates. ::: :::{note} Note In this case we will deduplicate candidates. ::: :::{note} Note just like with ‘batch’ the candidate set is identical for all examples in a batch. :::
inline – If each example comes with a list of possible label candidates, use those. Each teacher act for the task should contain the field ‘label_candidates’.

:::{note} Note With this setting, each example will have its own candidate set. :::
fixed – Use a global candidates list, provided by the user. If self.fixed\_candidates is not None, use a set of fixed candidates for all examples.

:::{note} Note This setting is not recommended for training unless the universe of possible candidates is very small. To use this, add the path to your text file with the candidates to the flag --fixed-candidates-path or -fcp. :::

Tracking ranking metrics¶

During training, we omit some ranking metrics (like hits@k) for the sake of speed. To get these ranking metrics, use the flag --train-predict True.

Evaluating a Model¶

Evaluating on a fixed candidate set¶

As during training, you must add the path to your text file with the candidates to the flag --fixed-candidates-path or -fcp. For many models, it’s convenient to cache the the encoding of the candidates in the case that the encoding is independent of the context. In order to do this and save to a file, set the flag --encode-candidate-vecs True. In order to do this, you must implement the function encode_candidates() which takes in a batch of padded candidates and outputs a batch of candidates encoded with the model.

Evaluating on “vocab” candidates¶

In addition to the options above for evaluating a model, we also have the option of evaluating “vocab” candidates. This is one global candidate list, extracted from the vocabulary with the exception of self.NULL_IDX.