TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT
Wei Zhang, Lu Hou, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, Qun Liu
Abstract
Transformer-based pre-training models like BERT have achieved remarkable performance in many natural language processing tasks. However, these models are both computation and memory expensive, hindering their deployment to resource-constrained devices. In this work, we propose TernaryBERT, which ternarizes the weights in a fine-tuned BERT model. Specifically, we use both approximation-based and loss-aware ternarization methods and empirically investigate the ternarization granularity of different parts of BERT. Moreover, to reduce the accuracy degradation caused by lower capacity of low bits, we leverage the knowledge distillation technique in the training process. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark and SQuAD show that our proposed TernaryBERT outperforms the other BERT quantization methods, and even achieves comparable performance as the full-precision model while being 14.9x smaller.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.emnlp-main.37
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 509–521
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.emnlp-main.37/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.37
- Cite (ACL):
- Wei Zhang, Lu Hou, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xiao Chen, Xin Jiang, and Qun Liu. 2020. TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 509–521, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/build-pipeline-with-new-library/2020.emnlp-main.37.pdf
- Code
- huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model + additional community code
- Data
- GLUE, SQuAD