flan-t5-small-ner can extract entities of specific types or definitions from text such as person, company, school, technology, and many more. It builds upon the FLAN-T5 architecture, which has strong performance across natural language processing tasks.

Example:

python

from transformers import AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM, AutoTokenizer
import torch

model_path = "agentlans/flan-t5-small-ner"
model = AutoModelForSeq2SeqLM.from_pretrained(model_path).to("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained(model_path)

def custom_split(s): # Processes the output from the model
    parts = s.split("<|sep|>")
    if not s.endswith("<|end|>"):
        parts = parts[:-1] # If output is truncated, then don't include last item
    else:
        parts[-1] = parts[-1].replace("<|end|>", "") # Remove the marker tokens
    return [p.strip() for p in parts if p.strip()]

def find_entities(input_text, entity_type):
    txt = entity_type + "<|sep|>" + input_text + "<|end|>" # Important: need exact input format
    inputs = tokenizer(txt, return_tensors="pt").to(model.device)
    outputs = model.generate(**inputs, max_new_tokens=100)
    decoded = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0], skip_special_tokens=True)
    return custom_split(decoded)

# Example usage
input_text = "In the bustling metropolis of New York City, Apple Inc. sponsored a conference where Dr. Elena Rodriguez presented groundbreaking research about neuroscience and AI."
print(find_entities(input_text, "person")) # ['Elena Rodriguez']
print(find_entities(input_text, "company")) # ['Apple Inc.']
print(find_entities(input_text, "fruit")) # []
print(find_entities(input_text, "subject")) # ['neuroscience', 'AI']

Limitations

False positives and negatives are possible.
May struggle with specialized knowledge or fine distinctions.
Performance may vary for very short or long texts.
English language only.
Consider privacy when processing sensitive text.

Training Procedure

Training hyperparameters

The following hyperparameters were used during training:

learning_rate: 5e-05
train_batch_size: 8
eval_batch_size: 8
seed: 42
optimizer: Use adamw_torch with betas=(0.9,0.999) and epsilon=1e-08 and optimizer_args=No additional optimizer arguments
lr_scheduler_type: linear
num_epochs: 5.0

Training results

Training Loss	Epoch	Step	Validation Loss	Input Tokens Seen
0.8398	1.0	19991	0.6227	66451084
0.7203	2.0	39982	0.5679	132976438
0.6479	3.0	59973	0.5605	199402582
0.6023	4.0	79964	0.5427	265875340
0.5879	5.0	99955	0.5393	332318598

Framework Versions

Transformers: 4.46.3
PyTorch: 2.5.1+cu124
Datasets: 3.2.0
Tokenizers: 0.20.3