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Extreme Language Model Compression with Optimal Subwords and Shared Projections (arxiv.org)
2 points by sel1 on Sep 29, 2019 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A big BERT is shrunk by cutting its word list and hidden size, then trained on mixed word lists so its words keep the original's meanings. It is ten times smaller than other compressed BERTs, with better size-accuracy trade-offs on language and dialogue tasks.

Abstract · Extremely Small BERT Models from Mixed-Vocabulary Training

Pretrained language models like BERT have achieved good results on NLP tasks, but are impractical on resource-limited devices due to memory footprint. A large fraction of this footprint comes from the input embeddings with large input vocabulary and embedding dimensions. Existing knowledge distillation methods used for model compression cannot be directly applied to train student models with reduced vocabulary sizes. To this end, we propose a distillation method to align the teacher and student embeddings via mixed-vocabulary training. Our method compresses BERT-LARGE to a task-agnostic model with smaller vocabulary and hidden dimensions, which is an order of magnitude smaller than other distilled BERT models and offers a better size-accuracy trade-off on language understanding benchmarks as well as a practical dialogue task.

Sanqiang Zhao, Raghav Gupta, Yang Song, Denny Zhou
arXiv:1909.11687 · cs.CL · submitted Sep 25, 2019 · updated Feb 6, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · To appear at EACL 2021

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