Pruning Attention Heads of Transformer Models Using A* Search: A Novel Approach to Compress Big NLP Architectures
Recent years have seen a growing adoption of Transformer models such as BERT in Natural Language Processing and even in Computer Vision. However, due to their size, there has been limited adoption of such models within resource-constrained computing environments. This paper proposes novel pruning algorithm to compress transformer models by eliminating redundant Attention Heads. We apply the A* search algorithm to obtain a pruned model with strict accuracy guarantees. Our results indicate that the method could eliminate as much as 40% of the attention heads in the BERT transformer model with no loss in accuracy.
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Methods
Absolute Position Encodings •
Adam •
Attention Dropout •
BERT •
BPE •
Dense Connections •
Dropout •
GELU •
Label Smoothing •
Layer Normalization •
Linear Layer •
Linear Warmup With Linear Decay •
Multi-Head Attention •
Position-Wise Feed-Forward Layer •
Pruning •
Residual Connection •
Scaled Dot-Product Attention •
Softmax •
Transformer •
Weight Decay •
WordPiece
