Teacher Intervention: Improving Convergence of Quantization Aware Training for Ultra-Low Precision Transformers

This Repository provides a Pytorch implementation of Teacher Intervention: Improving Convergence of Quantization Aware Training for Ultra-Low Precision Transformers (EACL 2023 Main Track) Paper

• This work proposes a proactive knowledge distillation method (Figure 3-(b)) called Teacher Intervention (TI) for fast converging QAT (Figure 3-c) of ultra-low precision pre-trained Transformers.

• TI intervenes layer-wise signal propagation with the non-erroneous signal form the Full-Precision Teacher model (Figure 3-b) to remove the interference of propagated quantization errors, smoothing the loss surface of QAT and expediting the convergence. (Figure 2-a,b)

• Furthermore, we propose a gradual intervention mechanism to stabilize the recovery of subsections of Transformer layers from quantization. This unified intervention mechanism can manage diverse characteristics of fine-tuned Transformers for various downstream tasks. (Figure 4)

• We perform an extensive evaluation on various fine-tuned Transformers (BERT-base/large (Devlin et al., NAACL 2019), TinyBERT-4L/6L (Jiao et al., EMNLP 2020), and SkipBERT-6L (Wu et al., NeurIPS 2022) for NLP, and ViT (Dosovitskiy et al., ICLR 2020) for CV) and demonstrate that TI consistently achieves superior accuracy with lower fine-tuning iterations compared to the state-of-the-art QAT methods. (In particular, TI outperforms TernaryBERT (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2020) on GLUE tasks with 12.5x savings in fine-tuning hours. (Figure 1)

Getting Started

pip install -r requirements.txt

Model

You can get GLUE task-specific fine-tuned BERT base model using hugging face code. https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/master/examples/pytorch/text-classification

GLUE Dataset

Download GLUE. https://github.com/nyu-mll/GLUE-baselines

Teacher Intervention Two-Step QAT

Setting QAT arguments

The proposed TI method consists of Two Steps. (See Table-1 for detailed Two-Step TI QAT)

1. Teacher Intervention is employed to finetune quantized weights of either FFN or SA-PROP sub-layers of Transformers. (Convergence in this step is very quick, as shown in Fig.3(c))
2. Quantization is applied to the entire weights of Transformer layers for QAT

You can easily run TI two-step QAT pipeline using two bash scripts.

• In step-1, Turn-on TI options you want to try in the bash scripts. (e.g., for TI-G, set teacher_gradual=1)
• In step-2, Set step1_option argument same as step-1 training option. (e.g., for TI-G, step1_option=GRAD)

For QAT-step1 Set these args as follows in run_TI_step_1.sh bash script

# Single TI options (Experimental)
teacher_attnmap=0 # MI
teacher_context=0 # CI
teacher_output=0 # OI

# TI-G (Gradual Teacher Intervention) options 
teacher_gradual=1 # GRAD
teacher_stochastic=0 # STOCHASTIC
teacher_inverted=0 # INVERTED

For QAT-step2 Set this arg as follows in run_TI_step_2.sh bash script.

step1_option=GRAD # {MI, CI, OI, GRAD, INVERTED, STOCHASTIC}

Then you are ready to run Teacher Itervetion Two-Step QAT!

Running TI Two-Step QAT

# For TI-QAT Step-1 Training 
bash run_TI_step_1.sh {GPU Num} {GLUE Task} 

# For TI-QAT Step-2 Training
bash run_TI_step_2.sh {GPU Num} {GLUE Task} 

For Data Augmentation (DA) Option, use TinyBERT Data Augmentation for getting an expanded GLUE Dataset.

https://github.com/huawei-noah/Pretrained-Language-Model/tree/master/TinyBERT

Reference

• This Pytorch implementation is based on "TernaryBERT: Distillation-aware Ultra-low Bit BERT, Zhang et al, EMNLP 2020" Git
• For further information about hessian analysis or loss landscape visualization, please refer
  • "How Do Vit Work?, Park et al, ICLR 2022" Git
  • "Understanding and Improving KD for QAT of Large Transformer Encoders, Kim et al, EMNLP 2022" Git

For further question, contact me anytime (minsoo2333@hanyang.ac.kr) or kindly leave questions in issues tab.