Papers › Simplified TinyBERT: Knowledge Distillation for Document Retrieval

Simplified TinyBERT: Knowledge Distillation for Document Retrieval

16 Sep 2020arXiv:2009.07531archive 2025-07-28

Xuanang Chen, Ben He, Kai Hui, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun

Despite the effectiveness of utilizing the BERT model for document ranking, the high computational cost of such approaches limits their uses. To this end, this paper first empirically investigates the effectiveness of two knowledge distillation models on the document ranking task. In addition, on top of the recently proposed TinyBERT model, two simplifications are proposed. Evaluations on two different and widely-used benchmarks demonstrate that Simplified TinyBERT with the proposed simplifications not only boosts TinyBERT, but also significantly outperforms BERT-Base when providing 15× speedup.

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cxa-unique/Simplified-TinyBERT mentioned on GitHubpytorch report

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Tasks

Document RankingKnowledge DistillationRetrieval

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Methods

AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutKnowledge DistillationLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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