Papers › AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

AdaBERT: Task-Adaptive BERT Compression with Differentiable Neural Architecture Search

13 Jan 2020arXiv:2001.04246archive 2025-07-28

Daoyuan Chen, Yaliang Li, Minghui Qiu, Zhen Wang, Bofang Li, Bolin Ding, Hongbo Deng, Jun Huang, Wei. Lin, Jingren Zhou

Large pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown their effectiveness in various natural language processing tasks. However, the huge parameter size makes them difficult to be deployed in real-time applications that require quick inference with limited resources. Existing methods compress BERT into small models while such compression is task-independent, i.e., the same compressed BERT for all different downstream tasks. Motivated by the necessity and benefits of task-oriented BERT compression, we propose a novel compression method, AdaBERT, that leverages differentiable Neural Architecture Search to automatically compress BERT into task-adaptive small models for specific tasks. We incorporate a task-oriented knowledge distillation loss to provide search hints and an efficiency-aware loss as search constraints, which enables a good trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness for task-adaptive BERT compression. We evaluate AdaBERT on several NLP tasks, and the results demonstrate that those task-adaptive compressed models are 12.7x to 29.3x faster than BERT in inference time and 11.5x to 17.0x smaller in terms of parameter size, while comparable performance is maintained.

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AdaBERTStudent alibaba/EasyTransfer/easytransfer/model_zoo/modeling_adabert.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 7cacce8e0987c7f5 · report
get_gumbel alibaba/EasyTransfer/easytransfer/model_zoo/modeling_adabert.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 9abcdafb7e7d2c35 · report
get_logits alibaba/EasyTransfer/easytransfer/model_zoo/modeling_adabert.py community (archive-listed) unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 38d356f844721fce · report

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Knowledge DistillationNeural Architecture Search

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLSTMLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSigmoid ActivationSoftmaxTanh ActivationWeight DecayWordPiece

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