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DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter

2019/10/02 by Victor Sanh, Sanh, Victor, Lysandre Debut +5 · 1 voice · 708 citations
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.CL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1910.01108

February 2020 - Revision: fix bug in evaluation metrics, updated metrics, argumentation unchanged. 5 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables. Accepted at the 5th Workshop on Energy Efficient Machine Learning and Cognitive Computing - NeurIPS 2019

arxiv published 2019/10/02 · arxiv created 2020/03/01 · arxiv updated 2020/03/03

Abstract

As Transfer Learning from large-scale pre-trained models becomes more prevalent in Natural Language Processing (NLP), operating these large models in on-the-edge and/or under constrained computational training or inference budgets remains challenging. In this work, we propose a method to pre-train a smaller general-purpose language representation model, called DistilBERT, which can then be fine-tuned with good performances on a wide range of tasks like its larger counterparts. While most prior work investigated the use of distillation for building task-specific models, we leverage knowledge distillation during the pre-training phase and show that it is possible to reduce the size of a BERT model by 40%, while retaining 97% of its language understanding capabilities and being 60% faster. To leverage the inductive biases learned by larger models during pre-training, we introduce a triple loss combining language modeling, distillation and cosine-distance losses. Our smaller, faster and lighter model is cheaper to pre-train and we demonstrate its capabilities for on-device computations in a proof-of-concept experiment and a comparative on-device study.

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