On the weak link between importance and prunability of attention heads (2020.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a large fraction of attention heads can be randomly pruned with limited effect on accuracy, a new study finds . a second study finds no advantage in pruning attention heads identified to be important based on the location of a head . |
| Approach: | They examine the importance of pruning attention heads on a Transformer-based model . they find no advantage in pruning attention head positions on the BERT model based on location . |
| Outcome: | The results show that pruning strategies on Transformer and BERT models are not important based on location . the results suggest that interpretation of attention heads does not strongly inform pruning strategies. |
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