Layer-wise Pruning of Transformer Attention Heads for Efficient Language Modeling

2021 18th International SoC Design Conference (ISOCC) 2021 · Kyuhong Shim, Iksoo Choi, Wonyong Sung, Jungwook Choi ·

While Transformer-based models have shown impressive language modeling performance, the large computation cost is often prohibitive for practical use. Attention head pruning, which removes unnecessary attention heads in the multihead attention, is a promising technique to solve this problem. However, it does not evenly reduce the overall load because the heavy feedforward module is not affected by head pruning. In this paper, we apply layer-wise attention head pruning on All-attention Transformer so that the entire computation and the number of parameters can be reduced proportionally to the number of pruned heads. While the architecture has the potential to fully utilize head pruning, we propose three training methods that are especially helpful to minimize performance degradation and stabilize the pruning process. Our pruned model shows consistently lower perplexity within a comparable parameter size than Transformer-XL on WikiText-103 language modeling benchmark.

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