Quicktour

We provide two main entry points to evaluate models:

• lighteval accelerate : evaluate models on CPU or one or more GPUs using 🤗 Accelerate
• lighteval nanotron: evaluate models in distributed settings using ⚡️ Nanotron

Accelerate

Evaluate a model on a GPU

To evaluate GPT-2 on the Truthful QA benchmark, run:

lighteval accelerate \
     --model_args "pretrained=gpt2" \
     --tasks "leaderboard|truthfulqa:mc|0|0" \
     --override_batch_size 1 \
     --output_dir="./evals/"

Here, --tasks refers to either a comma-separated list of supported tasks from the tasks_list in the format:

{suite}|{task}|{num_few_shot}|{0 or 1 to automatically reduce `num_few_shot` if prompt is too long}

or a file path like examples/tasks/recommended_set.txt which specifies multiple task configurations.

Tasks details can be found in the file implementing them.

Evaluate a model on one or more GPUs

Data parallelism

To evaluate a model on one or more GPUs, first create a multi-gpu config by running.

accelerate config

You can then evaluate a model using data parallelism on 8 GPUs like follows:

accelerate launch --multi_gpu --num_processes=8 -m \
    lighteval accelerate \
    --model_args "pretrained=gpt2" \
    --tasks "leaderboard|truthfulqa:mc|0|0" \
    --override_batch_size 1 \
    --output_dir="./evals/"

Here, --override_batch_size defines the batch size per device, so the effective batch size will be override_batch_size * num_gpus.

Pipeline parallelism

To evaluate a model using pipeline parallelism on 2 or more GPUs, run:

lighteval accelerate \
    --model_args "pretrained=gpt2,model_parallel=True" \
    --tasks "leaderboard|truthfulqa:mc|0|0" \
    --override_batch_size 1 \
    --output_dir="./evals/"

This will automatically use accelerate to distribute the model across the GPUs.

Model Arguments

The --model_args argument takes a string representing a list of model argument. The arguments allowed vary depending on the backend you use (vllm or accelerate).

Accelerate

• pretrained (str): HuggingFace Hub model ID name or the path to a pre-trained model to load. This is effectively the pretrained_model_name_or_path argument of from_pretrained in the HuggingFace transformers API.
• tokenizer (Optional[str]): HuggingFace Hub tokenizer ID that will be used for tokenization.
• multichoice_continuations_start_space (Optional[bool]): Whether to add a space at the start of each continuation in multichoice generation. For example, context: “What is the capital of France?” and choices: “Paris”, “London”. Will be tokenized as: “What is the capital of France? Paris” and “What is the capital of France? London”. True adds a space, False strips a space, None does nothing
• subfolder (Optional[str]): The subfolder within the model repository.
• revision (str): The revision of the model.
• max_gen_toks (Optional[int]): The maximum number of tokens to generate.
• max_length (Optional[int]): The maximum length of the generated output.
• add_special_tokens (bool, optional, defaults to True): Whether to add special tokens to the input sequences. If None, the default value will be set to True for seq2seq models (e.g. T5) and False for causal models.
• model_parallel (bool, optional, defaults to False): True/False: force to use or not the accelerate library to load a large model across multiple devices. Default: None which corresponds to comparing the number of processes with the number of GPUs. If it’s smaller => model-parallelism, else not.
• dtype (Union[str, torch.dtype], optional, defaults to None):): Converts the model weights to dtype, if specified. Strings get converted to torch.dtype objects (e.g. float16 -> torch.float16). Use dtype="auto" to derive the type from the model’s weights.
• device (Union[int, str]): device to use for model training.
• quantization_config (Optional[BitsAndBytesConfig]): quantization configuration for the model, manually provided to load a normally floating point model at a quantized precision. Needed for 4-bit and 8-bit precision.
• trust_remote_code (bool): Whether to trust remote code during model loading.

VLLM

• pretrained (str): HuggingFace Hub model ID name or the path to a pre-trained model to load.
• gpu_memory_utilisation (float): The fraction of GPU memory to use.
• batch_size (int): The batch size for model training.
• revision (str): The revision of the model.
• dtype (str, None): The data type to use for the model.
• tensor_parallel_size (int): The number of tensor parallel units to use.
• data_parallel_size (int): The number of data parallel units to use.
• max_model_length (int): The maximum length of the model.
• swap_space (int): The CPU swap space size (GiB) per GPU.
• seed (int): The seed to use for the model.
• trust_remote_code (bool): Whether to trust remote code during model loading.
• use_chat_template (bool): Whether to use the chat template or not.
• add_special_tokens (bool): Whether to add special tokens to the input sequences.
• multichoice_continuations_start_space (bool): Whether to add a space at the start of each continuation in multichoice generation.
• subfolder (Optional[str]): The subfolder within the model repository.

Nanotron

To evaluate a model trained with nanotron on a single gpu.

 torchrun --standalone --nnodes=1 --nproc-per-node=1  \
 src/lighteval/__main__.py nanotron \
 --checkpoint_config_path ../nanotron/checkpoints/10/config.yaml \
 --lighteval_config_path examples/nanotron/lighteval_config_override_template.yaml

The nproc-per-node argument should match the data, tensor and pipeline parallelism confidured in the lighteval_config_template.yaml file. That is: nproc-per-node = data_parallelism * tensor_parallelism * pipeline_parallelism.