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Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Compressing BERT: Studying the Effects of Weight Pruning on Transfer Learning

Mitchell A. Gordon; Kevin Duh; Nicholas Andrews · 2020 · arXiv

WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate

The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.

Abstract (excerpt)

Pre-trained universal feature extractors, such as BERT for natural language processing and VGG for computer vision, have become effective methods for improving deep learning models without requiring more labeled data. While effective, feature extractors like BERT may be prohibitively large for some deployment scenarios. We explore weight pruning for BERT and ask: how does compression during pre-training affect transfer learning? We find that pruning affects transfer learning in three broad regimes. Low levels of pruning (30-40%) do not affect pre-training loss or transfer to downstream tasks a

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Metadata source: arXiv