

autoencoding models
See encoder models and masked language modeling
autoregressive models
See causal language modeling and decoder models
B
backbone
The backbone is the network (embeddings and layers) that outputs the raw hidden states or features. It is usually connected to a head which accepts the features as its input to make a prediction. For example, [ViTModel] is a backbone without a specific head on top. Other models can also use [VitModel] as a backbone such as DPT.
C
causal language modeling
A pretraining task where the model reads the texts in order and has to predict the next word. It's usually done by
reading the whole sentence but using a mask inside the model to hide the future tokens at a certain timestep.
channel
Color images are made up of some combination of values in three channels: red, green, and blue (RGB) and grayscale images only have one channel. In 🤗 Transformers, the channel can be the first or last dimension of an image's tensor: [n_channels, height, width] or [height, width, n_channels].
connectionist temporal classification (CTC)
An algorithm which allows a model to learn without knowing exactly how the input and output are aligned; CTC calculates the distribution of all possible outputs for a given input and chooses the most likely output from it. CTC is commonly used in speech recognition tasks because speech doesn't always cleanly align with the transcript for a variety of reasons such as a speaker's different speech rates.
convolution
A type of layer in a neural network where the input matrix is multiplied element-wise by a smaller matrix (kernel or filter) and the values are summed up in a new matrix. This is known as a convolutional operation which is repeated over the entire input matrix. Each operation is applied to a different segment of the input matrix. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are commonly used in computer vision.
D
DataParallel (DP)
Parallelism technique for training on multiple GPUs where the same setup is replicated multiple times, with each instance 
receiving a distinct data slice. The processing is done in parallel and all setups are synchronized at the end of each training step.
Learn more about how DataParallel works here.
decoder input IDs
This input is specific to encoder-decoder models, and contains the input IDs that will be fed to the decoder. These
inputs should be used for sequence to sequence tasks, such as translation or summarization, and are usually built in a
way specific to each model.
Most encoder-decoder models (BART, T5) create their decoder_input_ids on their own from the labels. In such models,
passing the labels is the preferred way to handle training.
Please check each model's docs to see how they handle these input IDs for sequence to sequence training.
decoder models
Also referred to as autoregressive models, decoder models involve a pretraining task (called causal language modeling) where the model reads the texts in order and has to predict the next word. It's usually done by
reading the whole sentence with a mask to hide future tokens at a certain timestep.