Papers › Structural Pruning of Pre-trained Language Models via Neural Architecture Search

Structural Pruning of Pre-trained Language Models via Neural Architecture Search

3 May 2024arXiv:2405.02267archive 2025-07-28

Aaron Klein, Jacek Golebiowski, Xingchen Ma, Valerio Perrone, Cedric Archambeau

Pre-trained language models (PLM), for example BERT or RoBERTa, mark the state-of-the-art for natural language understanding task when fine-tuned on labeled data. However, their large size poses challenges in deploying them for inference in real-world applications, due to significant GPU memory requirements and high inference latency. This paper explores neural architecture search (NAS) for structural pruning to find sub-parts of the fine-tuned network that optimally trade-off efficiency, for example in terms of model size or latency, and generalization performance. We also show how we can utilize more recently developed two-stage weight-sharing NAS approaches in this setting to accelerate the search process. Unlike traditional pruning methods with fixed thresholds, we propose to adopt a multi-objective approach that identifies the Pareto optimal set of sub-networks, allowing for a more flexible and automated compression process.

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Natural Language UnderstandingNeural Architecture Search

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionPruningResidual ConnectionRoBERTaSETSoftmaxWeight DecayWordPiece

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