@inproceedings{srinivasagan-ostermann-2024-hybridbert,
    title = "{H}ybrid{BERT} - Making {BERT} Pretraining More Efficient Through Hybrid Mixture of Attention Mechanisms",
    author = "Srinivasagan, Gokul  and
      Ostermann, Simon",
    editor = "Cao, Yang (Trista)  and
      Papadimitriou, Isabel  and
      Ovalle, Anaelia  and
      Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Ferraro, Francis  and
      Swayamdipta, Swabha",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)",
    month = jun,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Mexico City, Mexico",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2024.naacl-srw.30/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.naacl-srw.30",
    pages = "285--291",
    abstract = "Pretrained transformer-based language models have produced state-of-the-art performance in most natural language understanding tasks. These models undergo two stages of training: pretraining on a huge corpus of data and fine-tuning on a specific downstream task. The pretraining phase is extremely compute-intensive and requires several high-performance computing devices like GPUs and several days or even months of training, but it is crucial for the model to capture global knowledge and also has a significant impact on the fine-tuning task. This is a major roadblock for researchers without access to sophisticated computing resources. To overcome this challenge, we propose two novel hybrid architectures called HybridBERT (HBERT), which combine self-attention and additive attention mechanisms together with sub-layer normalization. We introduce a computing budget to the pretraining phase, limiting the training time and usage to a single GPU. We show that HBERT attains twice the pretraining accuracy of a vanilla-BERT baseline. We also evaluate our proposed models on two downstream tasks, where we outperform BERT-base while accelerating inference. Moreover, we study the effect of weight initialization with a limited pretraining budget. The code and models are publicly available at: www.github.com/gokulsg/HBERT/."
}