On the Distribution, Sparsity, and Inference-time Quantization of Attention Values in Transformers (2021.findings-acl)
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Tianchu Ji, Shraddhan Jain, Michael Ferdman, Peter Milder, H. Andrew Schwartz, Niranjan Balasubramanian
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that attention can be pruned to zeros with minimal loss in accuracy. |
| Approach: | They propose a pruning technique which quantizes attention to a 3-bit format without retraining . they find that 80% of attention values can be pruned to zeros with minimal loss in accuracy . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach produces only a few unique attention values with minimal loss in accuracy. |
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