diff --git a/requirements/nlp.txt b/requirements/nlp.txt
index f18dde2e..2e0838fc 100644
--- a/requirements/nlp.txt
+++ b/requirements/nlp.txt
@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ fasttext
 jieba>=0.42.1
 megatron_util
 pai-easynlp
-# “protobuf version beyond 3.20.0 is not compatible with TensorFlow 1.x, therefore is discouraged.”
+# protobuf version beyond 3.20.0 is not compatible with TensorFlow 1.x, therefore is discouraged.
 protobuf>=3.19.0,<3.21.0
 # rough-score was just recently updated from 0.0.4 to 0.0.7
 # which introduced compatability issues that are being investigated
@@ -14,4 +14,5 @@ spacy>=2.3.5
 subword_nmt>=0.3.8
 text2sql_lgesql
 tokenizers
-transformers>=4.12.0
+# recent 4.23.1 update introduce breaking api change, limit upper version temporarily.
+transformers>=4.12.0,<=4.22.0