Default arguments of clm example are confusing

I was having a look at the run_clm.py script and which new arguments are available to push to the hub.

python transformers\examples\pytorch\language-modeling\run_clm.py -h

I see the following options (note the True defaults for all):

  --no_keep_linebreaks  Whether to keep line breaks when using TXT files or not. (default: True)
  --keep_linebreaks [KEEP_LINEBREAKS]
                        Whether to keep line breaks when using TXT files or not. (default: True)

  --no_dataloader_pin_memory
                        Whether or not to pin memory for DataLoader. (default: True)
  --dataloader_pin_memory [DATALOADER_PIN_MEMORY]
                        Whether or not to pin memory for DataLoader. (default: True)

  --no_skip_memory_metrics
                        Whether or not to skip adding of memory profiler reports to metrics. (default: True)
  --skip_memory_metrics [SKIP_MEMORY_METRICS]
                        Whether or not to skip adding of memory profiler reports to metrics. (default: True)

From this, I cannot figure out what the default behaviour is or what I should change to become the expected behavior. I do not know what the use case is for this but it seems much better to only keep one of each option. If one the two for each option is deprecated, then that could be added in the description too.

I’m on current master (4.12 dev).

Who can help

@sgugger, @patil-suraj

[sgugger]

Oh the code of HfArgumentParser is not visually pleasing so that’s not a problem 😉 If you can suggest a PR, I’ll test on the branch that everything is good with it.

[BramVanroy]

The reason that it is False is because of the order of the arguments. The no_ variant is added to the argparser first (before the actual argument), therefore its defaults will get precedence down the line. I can make a suggestion in a PR to move things around?

That would involve moving this line

https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/3a8de58c5192b620228128430ea52e6eda81c40a/src/transformers/hf_argparser.py#L112-L113

to after this line

https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/3a8de58c5192b620228128430ea52e6eda81c40a/src/transformers/hf_argparser.py#L146

It is not visually as pleasing to repeat the if-clause but I’d argue that it could be worth it when documented well enough.