# Error when Finetuning a Pegasus Student

**URL:** <https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/error-when-finetuning-a-pegasus-student/2154>\
**Category:** Beginners\
**Created:** [November 21, 2020, 10:51am UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/error-when-finetuning-a-pegasus-student/2154 "2020-11-21T10:51:06Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![airnicco8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/ecae2f/32.png) [@airnicco8](https://discuss.huggingface.co/u/airnicco8)\
**Post date:** [November 21, 2020, 10:51am UTC](https://discuss.huggingface.co/t/error-when-finetuning-a-pegasus-student/2154/1 "2020-11-21T10:51:06Z")

</div>

Hi everyone, i’m trying to run finetune.py to distill a pegasus student (16-2) on XSUM.  
The problem is probably in the encoding of the source data i guess:

> ```
> File "D:\Repos\transformers\examples\seq2seq\utils.py", line 147, in get_char_lens
> return [len(x) for x in Path(data_file).open().readlines()]
> UnicodeDecodeError: 'charmap' codec can't decode byte 0x9d in position 4245: character maps to 
> <undefined>
> 
> ```

This is the command i launch:

```
python finetune.py --learning_rate=1e-4 --do_train --do_predict --n_val 1000 --val_check_interval 
0.25 --max_source_length 512 --max_target_length 56 --freeze_embeds --label_smoothing 0.1 -- 
adafactor --task summarization_xsum --data_dir xsum --train_batch_size=1 --eval_batch_size=1 -- 
output_dir distilpeg_xsum_sft_16_2 --num_train_epochs 6 --model_name_or_path 
distilpeg_xsum_16_2 --gpus 1

```

Maybe there are unsupported characters in the data?  
Thanks in advance!