This model is a distilled version of the [RoBERTa-base model](https://huggingface.co/roberta-base). It follows the same training procedure as [DistilBERT](https://huggingface.co/distilbert-base-uncased).
The code for the distillation process can be found [here](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/master/examples/distillation).
This model is case-sensitive: it makes a difference between english and English.
The model has 6 layers, 768 dimension and 12 heads, totalizing 82M parameters (compared to 125M parameters for RoBERTa-base).
On average DistilRoBERTa is twice as fast as Roberta-base.
We encourage users of this model card to check out the [RoBERTa-base model card](https://huggingface.co/roberta-base) to learn more about usage, limitations and potential biases.
- **Developed by:** Victor Sanh, Lysandre Debut, Julien Chaumond, Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face)
- **Model type:** Transformer-based language model
- **Language(s) (NLP):** English
- **License:** Apache 2.0
- **Related Models:** [RoBERTa-base model card](https://huggingface.co/roberta-base)
You can use the raw model for masked language modeling, but it's mostly intended to be fine-tuned on a downstream task. See the [model hub](https://huggingface.co/models?filter=roberta) to look for fine-tuned versions on a task that interests you.
Note that this model is primarily aimed at being fine-tuned on tasks that use the whole sentence (potentially masked) to make decisions, such as sequence classification, token classification or question answering. For tasks such as text generation you should look at model like GPT2.
## Out of Scope Use
The model should not be used to intentionally create hostile or alienating environments for people. The model was not trained to be factual or true representations of people or events, and therefore using the models to generate such content is out-of-scope for the abilities of this model.
# Bias, Risks, and Limitations
Significant research has explored bias and fairness issues with language models (see, e.g., [Sheng et al. (2021)](https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.330.pdf) and [Bender et al. (2021)](https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3442188.3445922)). Predictions generated by the model may include disturbing and harmful stereotypes across protected classes; identity characteristics; and sensitive, social, and occupational groups. For example:
DistilRoBERTa was pre-trained on [OpenWebTextCorpus](https://skylion007.github.io/OpenWebTextCorpus/), a reproduction of OpenAI's WebText dataset (it is ~4 times less training data than the teacher RoBERTa). See the [roberta-base model card](https://huggingface.co/roberta-base/blob/main/README.md) for further details on training.
When fine-tuned on downstream tasks, this model achieves the following results (see [GitHub Repo](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/main/examples/research_projects/distillation/README.md)):
Carbon emissions can be estimated using the [Machine Learning Impact calculator](https://mlco2.github.io/impact#compute) presented in [Lacoste et al. (2019)](https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.09700).
- Sanh, V., Debut, L., Chaumond, J., & Wolf, T. (2019). DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01108.
# How to Get Started With the Model
You can use the model directly with a pipeline for masked language modeling: