In plain words: Instead of storing a table of word meanings, this system computes each word's numeric meaning on the fly, shrinking the model. Its smallest version scores within 4% of the smallest standard BERT on language tasks while shrinking to 1.2 MB, about 15 times smaller.
Abstract · EELBERT: Tiny Models through Dynamic Embeddings
We introduce EELBERT, an approach for compression of transformer-based models (e.g., BERT), with minimal impact on the accuracy of downstream tasks. This is achieved by replacing the input embedding layer of the model with dynamic, i.e. on-the-fly, embedding computations. Since the input embedding layer accounts for a significant fraction of the model size, especially for the smaller BERT variants, replacing this layer with an embedding computation function helps us reduce the model size significantly. Empirical evaluation on the GLUE benchmark shows that our BERT variants (EELBERT) suffer minimal regression compared to the traditional BERT models. Through this approach, we are able to develop our smallest model UNO-EELBERT, which achieves a GLUE score within 4% of fully trained BERT-tiny, while being 15x smaller (1.2 MB) in size.
Gabrielle Cohn, Rishika Agarwal, Deepanshu Gupta, Siddharth Patwardhan
arXiv:2310.20144 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Oct 31, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · EMNLP 2023, Industry Track 9 pages, 2 figures, 5 tables