A Fast Post-Training Pruning Framework for Transformers

Inspired by post-training quantization (PTQ) toolkits, we propose a post-training pruning framework tailored for Transformers. Different from existing pruning methods, our framework does not require re-training to retain high accuracy after pruning. This makes our method fully automated and 10x-1000x faster in terms of pruning time. [paper link]

Prerequisite

Install denpendencies

Tested on Python 3.7.10. You need an NVIDIA GPU (with 16+ GB memory) to run our code.

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Prepare checkpoints

We provide the (unpruned) checkpoints of BERT-base and DistilBERT used in our experiments. We used the pre-trained weights provided by HuggingFace Transformers, and fine-tuned them for 8 downstream tasks with standard training recipes.

Model	Link
BERT-base	gdrive
DistilBERT	gdrive

Our framework only accepts the HuggingFace Transformers PyTorch models. If you use your own checkpoints, please make sure that each checkpoint directory contains both config.json and pytorch_model.bin.

Prune models and test the accuracy on GLUE/SQuAD benchmarks

• Supported models: BERT-base/large, DistilBERT, RoBERTa-base/large, DistilRoBERTa, etc.
• Supported tasks:
  • GLUE: MNLI, QQP, QNLI, SST-2, STS-B, MRPC
  • SQuAD V1.1 & V2

The following example prunes a QQP BERT-base model with 50% MAC (FLOPs) constraint:

python3 main.py --model_name bert-base-uncased \
                --task_name qqp \
                --ckpt_dir <your HF ckpt directory> \
                --constraint 0.5

You can also control more arguments such as sample dataset size (see main.py).

Citation

@misc{kwon2022fast,
      title={A Fast Post-Training Pruning Framework for Transformers}, 
      author={Woosuk Kwon and Sehoon Kim and Michael W. Mahoney and Joseph Hassoun and Kurt Keutzer and Amir Gholami},
      year={2022},
      eprint={2204.09656},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Copyright

THIS SOFTWARE AND/OR DATA WAS DEPOSITED IN THE BAIR OPEN RESEARCH COMMONS REPOSITORY ON 02/07/23.