What is the Transformers library

 

🤖 What is the Transformers library

Transformers is an open-source Python library by Hugging Face that provides:

• Pre-trained transformer models

• Easy APIs to load, train, and use them

• Support for tasks like text, vision, audio, and multi-modal AI

It is the most widely used library for working with LLMs (Large Language Models).

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⚙️ What it Contains

Here’s what the transformers library gives you:

🧠 Pre-trained models

• 1000+ ready-to-use models like:

  • GPT, BERT, RoBERTa, T5, LLaMA, Falcon, Mistral, BLOOM, etc.

• Downloaded automatically from the Hugging Face Hub

⚒️ Model classes

• AutoModel, AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, etc.

• These automatically select the right architecture class for a model

📄 Tokenizers

• Converts text ↔ tokens (numbers) for the model

• Very fast (often implemented in Rust)

📦 Pipelines

• High-level API to run tasks quickly, for example:

  from transformers import pipeline
  generator = pipeline("text-generation", model="gpt2")
  print(generator("Once upon a time"))
  

🏋️ Training utilities

• Trainer and TrainingArguments for fine-tuning

• Works with PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX

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📊 Supported Tasks

Task	Example
Text Generation	Chatbots, storytelling
Text Classification	Spam detection, sentiment
Question Answering	QA bots
Translation	English → French
Summarization	Summarizing articles
Token Classification	Named entity recognition
Vision/Multimodal	Image captioning, VQA

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💡 Why It’s Popular

• Huge model zoo (open weights)

• Unified interface across models

• Active community and documentation

• Compatible with Hugging Face ecosystem: Datasets, Accelerate, PEFT (LoRA)

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📌 Summary

transformers is the go-to library for using and fine-tuning state-of-the-art AI models — especially large language models — with just a few lines of code.