TensorFlow Lite Transformers w/ Android demo

Convert Transformers models imported from the 🤗 Transformers library and use them on Android. You can also check out our swift-coreml-transformers repo if you're looking for Transformers on iOS.

DistilBERT for Question Answering

The app contains a demo of the DistilBERT model (97% of BERT’s performance on GLUE) fine-tuned for Question answering on the SQuAD dataset. It provides 48 passages from the dataset for users to choose from.

Coming soon: GPT-2, quantization... and much more!

---

Build the demo app using Android Studio

Prerequisites

• If you don't have already, install Android Studio, following the instructions on the website.
• Android Studio 3.2 or later.
• You need an Android device or Android emulator and Android development environment with minimum API 15.
• The app/libs directory contains a custom build of TensorFlow Lite with TensorFlow ops built-in, which is used by the app. It results in a bigger binary than the "normal" build but allows compatibility with models such as DistilBERT.

Building

• Open Android Studio, and from the Welcome screen, select Open an existing Android Studio project.
• From the Open File or Project window that appears, select the directory where you cloned this repo.
• You may also need to install various platforms and tools according to error messages.
• If it asks you to use Instant Run, click Proceed Without Instant Run.

Running

• You need to have an Android device plugged in with developer options enabled at this point. See here for more details on setting up developer devices.
• If you already have Android emulator installed in Android Studio, select a virtual device with minimum API 15.
• Click Run to run the demo app on your Android device.

Build the demo using gradle (command line)

Building and Installing

• Use the following command to build a demo apk:

./gradlew build

• Use the following command to install the apk onto your connected device:

adb install app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk

---

Models generation

Example scripts used to convert models are available in the models_generation directory. Please note that they require the nightly version of TensorFlow and might thus be unstable.

---

Credits

The Android app is forked from the bertqa example in the tensorflow/examples repository and uses the same tokenizer with DistilBERT.

License

Apache License 2.0