{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/adapting-by-pruning-a-case-study-on-bert","title":"Adapting by Pruning: A Case Study on BERT","arxiv_id":"2105.03343","date":"2021-05-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Yang Gao","Nicolo Colombo","Wei Wang"],"abstract":"Adapting pre-trained neural models to downstream tasks has become the standard practice for obtaining high-quality models. In this work, we propose a novel model adaptation paradigm, adapting by pruning, which prunes neural connections in the pre-trained model to optimise the performance on the target task; all remaining connections have their weights intact. We formulate adapting-by-pruning as an optimisation problem with a differentiable loss and propose an efficient algorithm to prune the model. We prove that the algorithm is near-optimal under standard assumptions and apply the algorithm to adapt BERT to some GLUE tasks. Results suggest that our method can prune up to 50% weights in BERT while yielding similar performance compared to the fine-tuned full model. We also compare our method with other state-of-the-art pruning methods and study the topological differences of their obtained sub-networks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.03343v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.03343v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"adapting-by-pruning-a-case-study-on-bert","repo_url":"https://github.com/yg211/bert_nli","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"pruning","method_name":"Pruning"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2105.03343","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}