Model Overview Card for StarChat-Alpha

Basic Information

• Model Name: StarChat-Alpha
• Developer/Creator: HuggingFaceH4
• Release Date: May 2, 2023
• Version: Alpha
• Model Type: Text-to-Text Language Model

Description

StarChat-Alpha is a 16B parameter GPT-like language model fine-tuned from the StarCoder base model to act as a helpful coding assistant. It is designed to generate code snippets, provide explanations, and assist with various programming tasks. As an alpha release, it is intended primarily for educational and research purposes.

Key Features

• Fine-tuned from StarCoder, a model trained on a vast corpus of programming languages and related text
• Capable of generating code snippets in multiple programming languages
• Can provide natural language explanations for programming concepts
• Designed to assist with a wide range of coding tasks

Intended Use

StarChat-Alpha is meant for educational and research purposes in the field of natural language processing and code generation. It can be used to explore the capabilities of language models in programming contexts, but it is not intended for production use due to its unaligned nature.

Language Support

The model primarily supports English for natural language interactions and can generate code in various programming languages.

Technical Details

Architecture

StarChat-Alpha is based on a GPT-like architecture, utilizing the transformer model structure. It builds upon the StarCoder base model, which was pretrained on a large corpus of programming-related text.Training DataThe model was fine-tuned on a blend of two datasets:

1. oasst1: The OpenAssistant dataset, which contains human-generated dialogues
2. databricks-dolly-15k: A dataset of instruction-following examples

The training data was filtered to include only English dialogues to maintain consistency with StarCoder's pretraining data.

Data Source and Size

The base model, StarCoder, was trained on one trillion tokens sourced from 80+ programming languages, GitHub issues, Git commits, and Jupyter notebooks, all under permissive licenses.

Knowledge Cutoff

The exact knowledge cutoff date for StarChat-Alpha is not specified in the available information. However, as it was released on May 2, 2023, its knowledge is likely current up to early 2023.

Diversity and Bias

As an alpha release, StarChat-Alpha has not been aligned to human preferences using techniques like Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). This lack of alignment means it may generate problematic or biased content, especially when prompted to do so.

Performance Metrics

Accuracy

Specific accuracy metrics for StarChat-Alpha are not provided in the available sources. However, it is noted that the model can generate syntactically valid code snippets, although they may be semantically incorrect or contain security vulnerabilities.

Speed

Information about the inference speed of StarChat-Alpha is not explicitly mentioned in the provided sources.

Robustness

The model demonstrates the ability to handle diverse programming-related queries and generate code in multiple languages. However, its robustness is limited by the lack of alignment techniques, which may result in inconsistent or problematic outputs.

Usage

Code Samples

Ethical Guidelines

The model card for StarChat-Alpha emphasizes that it is an alpha release intended only for educational or research purposes. Users should be aware that the model has not been aligned to human preferences and may generate problematic content. It is crucial to carefully inspect any code or URLs produced by the model before use.

License

StarCoderChat-Alpha is released under the BigCode Open RAIL-M v1 license.