Cannot import "Conversation"

[Phyks]

Hi,

The example HuggingFace pipeline does no longer work and fails with an error "Cannot import Conversation from transformers.pipelines": https://github.com/SeldonIO/MLServer/blob/master/docs/examples/huggingface/README.md.

As per https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/cannot-import-conversation-from-transformers-utils-py/91556/1, downgrading transformers library to version 4.41.2 (pip install transformers==4.41.2) does the trick and fixes the pipeline.

transformers dependency should probably be pinned to a stricter version, or the import should be fixed in huggingface runtime.

Best,

[sakoush]

@Phyks Thanks for your reporting this issue. I think it is better to fix the underlying issue with the import. We welcome contributions if you are happy to provide a fix for it. Thanks!

[umihesh]

I’ve submitted a fix for this issue in PR #2232.

I've moved the import of Conversation to a lazy loading function so that mlserver-huggingface can work with the newer versions of transformers, where Conversation was removed.

Lmk if there’s anything else needed.