MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices
Zhiqing Sun, Hongkun Yu, Xiaodan Song, Renjie Liu, Yiming Yang, Denny Zhou
Abstract
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved great success by using huge pre-trained models with hundreds of millions of parameters. However, these models suffer from heavy model sizes and high latency such that they cannot be deployed to resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose MobileBERT for compressing and accelerating the popular BERT model. Like the original BERT, MobileBERT is task-agnostic, that is, it can be generically applied to various downstream NLP tasks via simple fine-tuning. Basically, MobileBERT is a thin version of BERT_LARGE, while equipped with bottleneck structures and a carefully designed balance between self-attentions and feed-forward networks. To train MobileBERT, we first train a specially designed teacher model, an inverted-bottleneck incorporated BERT_LARGE model. Then, we conduct knowledge transfer from this teacher to MobileBERT. Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE while achieving competitive results on well-known benchmarks. On the natural language inference tasks of GLUE, MobileBERT achieves a GLUE score of 77.7 (0.6 lower than BERT_BASE), and 62 ms latency on a Pixel 4 phone. On the SQuAD v1.1/v2.0 question answering task, MobileBERT achieves a dev F1 score of 90.0/79.2 (1.5/2.1 higher than BERT_BASE).- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.195
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2158–2170
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.195
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.195
- Cite (ACL):
- Zhiqing Sun, Hongkun Yu, Xiaodan Song, Renjie Liu, Yiming Yang, and Denny Zhou. 2020. MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2158–2170, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices (Sun et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.acl-main.195.pdf
- Code
- tensorflow/models + additional community code
- Data
- GLUE, MRPC, SQuAD, SST