[Question] Best way to batch a large dataset?
An interesting alternative to investigate here would be to use the tf.io library which has some support for Arrow to TF conversion: https://www.tensorflow.org/io/api_docs/python/tfio/arrow/ArrowDataset

There are quite a few types supported, including lists so if the unsupported columns are dropped then we could maybe have a zero-copy mapping from Arrow to TensorFlow, including tokenized inputs and 1D tensors like the ones we mostly use in NLP: https://github.com/tensorflow/io/blob/322b3170c43ecac5c6af9e39dbd18fd747913e5a/tensorflow_io/arrow/python/ops/arrow_dataset_ops.py#L44-L72

Here is an introduction on Arrow to TF using tf.io: https://medium.com/tensorflow/tensorflow-with-apache-arrow-datasets-cdbcfe80a59f
I'm training on large datasets such as Wikipedia and BookCorpus. Following the instructions in [the tutorial notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/nlp/blob/master/notebooks/Overview.ipynb), I see the following recommended for TensorFlow:

```python
train_tf_dataset = train_tf_dataset.filter(remove_none_values, load_from_cache_file=False)
columns = ['input_ids', 'token_type_ids', 'attention_mask', 'start_positions', 'end_positions']
train_tf_dataset.set_format(type='tensorflow', columns=columns)
features = {x: train_tf_dataset[x].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, tokenizer.max_len]) for x in columns[:3]} 
labels = {"output_1": train_tf_dataset["start_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])}
labels["output_2"] = train_tf_dataset["end_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])
### Question about this last line ###
tfdataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((features, labels)).batch(8)
```

This code works for something like WikiText-2. However, scaling up to WikiText-103, the last line takes 5-10 minutes to run. I assume it is because tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() is pulling everything into memory, not lazily loading. This approach won't scale up to datasets 25x larger such as Wikipedia.

So I tried manual batching using `dataset.select()`:

```python
idxs = np.random.randint(len(dataset), size=bsz)
batch = dataset.select(idxs).map(lambda example: {"input_ids": tokenizer(example["text"])})
tf_batch = tf.constant(batch["ids"], dtype=tf.int64)
```

This appears to create a new Apache Arrow dataset with every batch I grab, and then tries to cache it. The runtime of `dataset.select([0, 1])` appears to be much worse than `dataset[:2]`. So using `select()` doesn't seem to be performant enough for a training loop.

Is there a performant scalable way to lazily load batches of nlp Datasets?
[Question] Best way to batch a large dataset? 
 I'm training on large datasets such as Wikipedia and BookCorpus. Following the instructions in [the tutorial notebook](https://colab.research.google.com/github/huggingface/nlp/blob/master/notebooks/Overview.ipynb), I see the following recommended for TensorFlow:

```python
train_tf_dataset = train_tf_dataset.filter(remove_none_values, load_from_cache_file=False)
columns = ['input_ids', 'token_type_ids', 'attention_mask', 'start_positions', 'end_positions']
train_tf_dataset.set_format(type='tensorflow', columns=columns)
features = {x: train_tf_dataset[x].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, tokenizer.max_len]) for x in columns[:3]} 
labels = {"output_1": train_tf_dataset["start_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])}
labels["output_2"] = train_tf_dataset["end_positions"].to_tensor(default_value=0, shape=[None, 1])
### Question about this last line ###
tfdataset = tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices((features, labels)).batch(8)
```

This code works for something like WikiText-2. However, scaling up to WikiText-103, the last line takes 5-10 minutes to run. I assume it is because tf.data.Dataset.from_tensor_slices() is pulling everything into memory, not lazily loading. This approach won't scale up to datasets 25x larger such as Wikipedia.

So I tried manual batching using `dataset.select()`:

```python
idxs = np.random.randint(len(dataset), size=bsz)
batch = dataset.select(idxs).map(lambda example: {"input_ids": tokenizer(example["text"])})
tf_batch = tf.constant(batch["ids"], dtype=tf.int64)
```

This appears to create a new Apache Arrow dataset with every batch I grab, and then tries to cache it. The runtime of `dataset.select([0, 1])` appears to be much worse than `dataset[:2]`. So using `select()` doesn't seem to be performant enough for a training loop.

Is there a performant scalable way to lazily load batches of nlp Datasets? 
 An interesting alternative to investigate here would be to use the tf.io library which has some support for Arrow to TF conversion: https://www.tensorflow.org/io/api_docs/python/tfio/arrow/ArrowDataset

There are quite a few types supported, including lists so if the unsupported columns are dropped then we could maybe have a zero-copy mapping from Arrow to TensorFlow, including tokenized inputs and 1D tensors like the ones we mostly use in NLP: https://github.com/tensorflow/io/blob/322b3170c43ecac5c6af9e39dbd18fd747913e5a/tensorflow_io/arrow/python/ops/arrow_dataset_ops.py#L44-L72

Here is an introduction on Arrow to TF using tf.io: https://medium.com/tensorflow/tensorflow-with-apache-arrow-datasets-cdbcfe80a59f