How to get all layers(12) hidden states of BERT?
## ❓ Questions & Help

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I tried to set the output_hidden_states=True, but only got 3 layers of the hidden states of model outputs for BERT, but theoricaly it should be 12, how can I get that?
You should have obtained the 12 layers as well as the embedding output. Are you sure you're not mistaking the output of the forward call (which is a tuple as well) with the hidden states?

Just to make sure, this is the correct way to obtain the hidden states:

```py
from transformers import BertModel, BertConfig

config = BertConfig.from_pretrained("xxx", output_hidden_states=True)
model = BertModel.from_pretrained("xxx", config=config)

outputs = model(inputs)
print(len(outputs))  # 3

hidden_states = outputs[2]
print(len(hidden_states))  # 13

embedding_output = hidden_states[0]
attention_hidden_states = hidden_states[1:]
```<|||||>> You should have obtained the 12 layers as well as the embedding output. Are you sure you're not mistaking the output of the forward call (which is a tuple as well) with the hidden states?
> 
> Just to make sure, this is the correct way to obtain the hidden states:
> 
> ```python
> from transformers import BertModel, BertConfig
> 
> config = BertConfig.from_pretrained("xxx", output_hidden_states=True)
> model = BertModel.from_pretrained("xxx", config=config)
> 
> outputs = model(inputs)
> print(len(outputs))  # 3
> 
> hidden_states = outputs[2]
> print(len(hidden_states))  # 13
> 
> embedding_output = hidden_states[0]
> attention_hidden_states = hidden_states[1:]
> ```

Thanks a lot, I think I just not find and realized the hidden states are stored at index 2 in the outputs.
By the way, where can I find the docs about the meaning of stored vectors at each index of the tuples? <|||||>In the doc for the `outputs` of `BertModel.
it's here: https://huggingface.co/transformers/model_doc/bert.html#transformers.BertModel<|||||>But for BERT model there is two input pooled_output and sequence_output.
 pooled_output, sequence_output = bert_layer([input_word_id, input_mask, segment_id])
 From here how can I get last 3 hidden layer outputs?<|||||>Hidden states will be returned if you will specify it in bert config, as noted above:
```
config = BertConfig.from_pretrained("xxx", output_hidden_states=True)
model = BertModel.from_pretrained("xxx", config=config)
```<|||||>@LysandreJik In ur code, what are `output[0]` and` output[1]`?<|||||>As it is mentioned in the [documentation](https://huggingface.co/transformers/model_doc/bert.html#bertmodel), the returns of the BERT model are `(last_hidden_state, pooler_output, hidden_states[optional], attentions[optional])`

`output[0]` is therefore the last hidden state and `output[1]` is the pooler output.<|||||>@LysandreJik What exactly pooler output is?<|||||>It's written in the documentation:

> Last layer hidden-state of the first token of the sequence (classification token) further processed by a Linear layer and a Tanh activation function. The Linear layer weights are trained from the next sentence prediction (classification) objective during pre-training.
> 
> This output is usually not a good summary of the semantic content of the input, you’re often better with averaging or pooling the sequence of hidden-states for the whole input sequence.<|||||>@LysandreJik Sorry but I don't understand what this means. If I want to get a vector of a sentence - I use the hidden state (`output[0]`) right?
What could pooler output be used for?<|||||>`pooler: (batch, hidden_dim)`: Can be used when you want to have a representation for the whole sequence, like the last state of a RNN would give you. It is used for instance in Text Classification task where the predicted label doesn't depend on each token in the input.<|||||>@mfuntowicz So `output[0]` is for a separate representation of each word in the sequence, and the pooler is for a joint representation of the entire sequence?<|||||>Exactly 😊<|||||>@mfuntowicz Great thanks!
Two question please:
1. When taking hidden state, I can also access per-token representation of intermediate layers by adding config. Is it possible to do access pooler_output of an intermediate layer?
2. So if I want to analyse sentence similarity (so the sentence "this desk is green" will be more similar to "this chair is yellow" than to "We ate pizza") - Is it better to take pooler output or to average token representation in the hidden states?<|||||>@mfuntowicz Can you please help?<|||||>Hi @orko19,

1. No this is not possible to do so because the "pooler" is a layer in itself in BERT that depends [on the last representation](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/src/transformers/modeling_bert.py#L437).

2. The best would be to finetune the pooling representation for you task and use the pooler then. Using either the pooling layer or the averaged representation of the tokens **as it**, might be too biased towards the training objective it was initially trained for. These layers directly linked to the loss so very prone to high bias.<|||||>@mfuntowicz Great thanks!<|||||>如果是使用的trainer.train（）这个是怎么获取它的中间层数据呢<|||||>Then, How to convert the output tensor to numpy?<|||||>> 如果是使用的trainer.train（）这个是怎么获取它的中间层数据呢

老哥，我也遇到这个问题了，请问你最后解决了吗，怎么弄的呢。