MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices

TL;DR

MobileBERT is a compact, task-agnostic version of BERT designed for resource-limited devices, achieving significant size and speed reductions while maintaining competitive NLP performance.

Contribution

The paper introduces MobileBERT, a smaller and faster BERT variant with a novel training method using knowledge transfer from a specially designed teacher model.

Findings

MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller than BERT_BASE.

MobileBERT is 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE.

MobileBERT achieves competitive results on NLP benchmarks.

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved great success by using huge pre-trained models with hundreds of millions of parameters. However, these models suffer from heavy model sizes and high latency such that they cannot be deployed to resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose MobileBERT for compressing and accelerating the popular BERT model. Like the original BERT, MobileBERT is task-agnostic, that is, it can be generically applied to various downstream NLP tasks via simple fine-tuning. Basically, MobileBERT is a thin version of BERT_LARGE, while equipped with bottleneck structures and a carefully designed balance between self-attentions and feed-forward networks. To train MobileBERT, we first train a specially designed teacher model, an inverted-bottleneck incorporated BERT_LARGE model. Then, we conduct knowledge transfer from this teacher to MobileBERT. Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE while achieving competitive results on well-known benchmarks. On the natural language inference tasks of GLUE, MobileBERT achieves a GLUEscore o 77.7 (0.6 lower than BERT_BASE), and 62 ms latency on a Pixel 4 phone. On the SQuAD v1.1/v2.0 question answering task, MobileBERT achieves a dev F1 score of 90.0/79.2 (1.5/2.1 higher than BERT_BASE).