Unifying training argument type annotations

[jannisborn]

What does this PR do?

This PR fixes the incorrect type annotations in the TrainingArguments class. Some arguments can handle complex types like evaluation_strategy: IntervalStrategy. However, when calling from CLI, they can be initialized using a str as well which is not reflected in the type annotations.

Solution: Fix the type annotations to Union[ComplexType, str].

Note that this PR simply ensures consistency between the docstrings and the annotated types. E.g., the docstring for evaluation_strategy is already:

        evaluation_strategy (`str` or [`~trainer_utils.IntervalStrategy`], *optional*, defaults to `"no"`):
            The evaluation strategy...

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Anyone in the community is free to review the PR once the tests have passed. Feel free to tag
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Please have a look @sgugger!

[HuggingFaceDocBuilderDev]

The documentation is not available anymore as the PR was closed or merged.

[jannisborn]

I understand that the tests are failing because of:

ValueError: Only `Union[X, NoneType]` (i.e., `Optional[X]`) is allowed for `Union` because
the argument parser only supports one type per argument. Problem encountered in field 'evaluation_strategy'.

Could this issue of not supporting multiple types be fixed in HF itself? I guess no since it's introduced upstream by arparse.add_argument not allowing multiple types? @sgugger

Ultimately, this is inconsistency between the type annotations and the actually possible types is caused by HF. I think it's quite problematic because it's a systematic inconsistency that makes things appear more complex as they are. If the annotation has to be a single type, then should it not be the simplest type that can actually be used, in this case str?
In that way, HF would be minimally invasive wrt downstream packages that indeed have stricter type annotation requirements.

[sgugger]

The type is not perfectly exact, but note that:

1. the argument will be converted to that type in the post-init, so while the init of the dataclass accepts both str and IntervalStrategy (or other enum types), the attribute will always be of the enum type.
2. having the enum has main type allows us to properly fill the choices part of the parser for CLI help.

So to be able to accept the change in type, we would need some custom code in HfArgumentParser to not only stop erroring on those types, but also properly fill the choices part. If you're interested in exploring this further, those are the missing steps we would need in order to merge this PR.

[BramVanroy]

Looking at this from the surface, it seems that this PR is (partially?) covered by the PR that was merged earlier today? #17933

There:

• "Complex" enumtypes like IntervalStrategy (all that subclass ExplicitEnum) now also subclass str. As a consequence, the argparse equivalents also accept any string value
• HfArgumentParser._parse_dataclass_field (that gives you the Union error) has been updated to allow Union's that include a str, because the str type is never an issue for argparse (as its the default)

[sgugger]

We don't have the error anymore, but we are still losing the autofill of "choices" and all the custom logic we had for enums here.

[jannisborn]

Thanks a lot @BramVanroy, that's a nice coincidence!!

@sgugger: Could we move up that logic about the autofill to an elif starting at L94?

[sgugger]

I think there should be an if at line 94 that replaces the field.dtype by the field.type.__args__ which is not str (like we replace the field.dtype that is not None below line 95 for Optional), then line 105 and the test for enums will be triggered properly.

Basically something like:

if type(None) not in field.type.__args__:
    # filter `str` in Union
    field.type = field.type.__args__[0] if field.type.__args__[1] == str else field.type.__args__[1]
    origin_type = getattr(field.type, "__origin__", field.type)
elif bool not in field.type.__args__:

before and replacing the line

if bool not in field.type.__args__:

[jannisborn]

Just did that!

[sgugger]

Thanks! Will play a bit with it tomorrow morning to triple-check nothing breaks then it should be good to merge!

[sgugger]

All good in my tests, thanks again for your work on this!