Training a RoBERTa-base language model on TPUs with TensorFlow and 🤗 Transformers

AI Impact Summary

This guide documents end-to-end training of a RoBERTa-base masked LM from scratch on TPUs using TensorFlow and Hugging Face Transformers. It details tokenizer training, TFRecord-based data preparation, and distributed training with TPUStrategy across TPU pods, including how to stream data via Google Cloud Storage and use a TensorFlow-native DataCollatorForLanguageModeling for masked language modeling. The workflow emphasizes XLA compatibility and realistic scale, illustrating infrastructure requirements and configuration steps needed to run large-scale LM training in production.