| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models like BERT have proven to be highly performant, but are often computationally expensive in many practical scenarios. |
| Approach: | They propose a speed-tunable FastBERT with adaptive inference time that can be flexibly adjusted under varying demands. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves promising results in English and Chinese datasets. |
Similar Papers
TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding (2020.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models are computationally expensive and difficult to efficiently execute on resource-restricted devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a Transformer distillation method that performs Transformer distillations at pre-training and task-specific learning stages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method accelerates inference and reduces model size while maintaining accuracy. |
DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT are notorious for being slow in both training and inference. |
| Approach: | They propose a method to accelerate BERT inference by inserting extra classification layers between each transformer layer of BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method saves up to 40% inference time with minimal degradation in model quality. |
MoEBERT: from BERT to Mixture-of-Experts via Importance-Guided Adaptation (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for training pre-trained language models have limited practicality due to latency requirements. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses a Mixture-of-Experts structure to increase model capacity and inference speed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing distillation methods on natural language understanding and question answering tasks. |
Adapt-and-Distill: Developing Small, Fast and Effective Pretrained Language Models for Domains (2021.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large pre-trained models suffer from domain shift and are not optimal for specific domains. |
| Approach: | They propose a general approach to developing small, fast and effective pretrained models for specific domains by adapting off-the-shelf general pretrained model and performing task-agnostic knowledge distillation in target domains. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves better performance over the BERT BASE model in domain-specific tasks while 3.3 smaller and 5.1 faster than the BRT BASE. |
TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT are computationally expensive and limited to resource-constrained devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a method which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms the other methods on the GLUE and SQUAD benchmarks while being 14.9x smaller. |
EarlyBERT: Efficient BERT Training via Early-bird Lottery Tickets (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale pre-trained language models require enormous computational resources and long training time. |
| Approach: | They propose an algorithm to reduce inference time and train large NLP models by slimming the self-attention and fully-connected sub-layers inside a transformer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm achieves comparable performance to standard BERT with 35 45% less training time. |
EfficientBERT: Progressively Searching Multilayer Perceptron via Warm-up Knowledge Distillation (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models have shown remarkable results on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to improve the feed-forward network (FFN) in BERT with a higher computational cost than improving the multi-head attention (MHA). |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is 6.9 smaller and 4.4 faster than BERTBASE and has competitive performances on GLUE and SQuAD Benchmarks. |
MiniALBERT: Model Distillation via Parameter-Efficient Recursive Transformers (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained Language Models (LMs) are an integral part of natural language processing but their usability is constrained by computational and time complexity and their increasing size. |
| Approach: | They propose a technique for converting knowledge of fully parameterised LMs into a compact recursive student. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models match the performance of bloated models with negligible performance losses. |
SlowBERT: Slow-down Attacks on Input-adaptive Multi-exit BERT (2023.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models such as Google’s BERT have been gaining significant improvements to various down-stream applications, but the enormous training and inference cost severely hinders its practice on real-time applications and hardwareconstrained edge devices. |
| Approach: | They propose a slow-down attack on input-adaptive multi-exit BERT where the adversary imperceptibly modifies the input texts to drastically increase the inference cost. |
| Outcome: | The proposed attack on input-adaptive multi-exit BERT dramatically increases the average inference cost by 4.57, which would hurt the service quality of multi-extit BRT in practice, e.g., increasing the real-time cloud services’ response times for online users. |
HybridBERT - Making BERT Pretraining More Efficient Through Hybrid Mixture of Attention Mechanisms (2024.naacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Pretrained transformer-based language models have produced state-of-the-art performance in most natural language understanding tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose two hybrid architectures that combine self-attention and additive attention mechanisms with sub-layer normalization to achieve double the pretraining accuracy of a vanilla-BERT baseline. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architectures outperform BERT-base on two downstream tasks while accelerating inference. |