In plain words: During fine-tuning, the model's numbers are rounded to 8-bit values so the network learns to work with that lower precision. This shrinks BERT 4x with almost no accuracy loss and can run faster on 8-bit hardware.
Abstract · Q8BERT: Quantized 8Bit BERT
Recently, pre-trained Transformer based language models such as BERT and GPT, have shown great improvement in many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models contain a large amount of parameters. The emergence of even larger and more accurate models such as GPT2 and Megatron, suggest a trend of large pre-trained Transformer models. However, using these large models in production environments is a complex task requiring a large amount of compute, memory and power resources. In this work we show how to perform quantization-aware training during the fine-tuning phase of BERT in order to compress BERT by $4\times$ with minimal accuracy loss. Furthermore, the produced quantized model can accelerate inference speed if it is optimized for 8bit Integer supporting hardware.
Ofir Zafrir, Guy Boudoukh, Peter Izsak, Moshe Wasserblat
arXiv:1910.06188 · cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Oct 14, 2019 · updated Oct 17, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 5 Pages, Accepted at the 5th Workshop on Energy Efficient Machine Learning and Cognitive Computing - NeurIPS 2019