autogen/flaml/nlp/README.md

# Hyperparameter Optimization for Huggingface Transformers

AutoTransformers is an AutoML class for fine-tuning pre-trained language models based on the transformers library.

An example of using AutoTransformers:

```python
from flaml.nlp.autotransformers import AutoTransformers

autohf = AutoTransformers()
preparedata_setting = {
    "dataset_subdataset_name": "glue:mrpc",
    "pretrained_model_size": "electra-base-discriminator:base",
    "data_root_path": "data/",
    "max_seq_length": 128,
}
autohf.prepare_data(**preparedata_setting)
autohf_settings = {"resources_per_trial": {"gpu": 1, "cpu": 1},
                    "num_samples": -1,  # unlimited sample size
                    "time_budget": 3600,
                    "ckpt_per_epoch": 1,
                    "fp16": False,
                   }
validation_metric, analysis = autohf.fit(**autohf_settings)

```

The current use cases that are supported:

1. A simplified version of fine-tuning the GLUE dataset using HuggingFace;
2. For selecting better search space for fine-tuning the GLUE dataset;
3. Use the search algorithms in flaml for more efficient fine-tuning of HuggingFace.

The use cases that can be supported in future:

1. HPO fine-tuning for text generation;
2. HPO fine-tuning for question answering.

## Troubleshooting fine-tuning HPO for pre-trained language models

To reproduce the results for our ACL2021 paper:

* [An Empirical Study on Hyperparameter Optimization for Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.09204). Xueqing Liu, Chi Wang. ACL-IJCNLP 2021.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{liu2021hpo,
    title={An Empirical Study on Hyperparameter Optimization for Fine-Tuning Pre-trained Language Models},
    author={Xueqing Liu and Chi Wang},
    year={2021},
    booktitle={ACL-IJCNLP},
}
```

Please refer to the following jupyter notebook: [Troubleshooting HPO for fine-tuning pre-trained language models](https://github.com/microsoft/FLAML/blob/main/notebook/research/acl2021.ipynb)