Efficient Transformer-based Large Scale Language Representations using Hardware-friendly Block Structured Pruning
University of Connecticut（康涅狄格大学）；Northeastern University（东北大学）；Syracuse University（雪城大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）；Stevens Institute of Technology（史蒂文斯理工学院）
Bingbing Li, Zhenglun Kong, Tianyun Zhang, Ji Li, Zhengang Li, Hang Liu, Caiwen Ding
Pre-trained large-scale language models have increasingly demonstrated high accuracy on many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, the limited weight storage and computational speed on hardware platforms have impeded the popularity of pre-trained models, especially in the era of edge computing. In this work, we propose an efficient transformer-based large-scale language representation using hardware-friendly block structure pruning. We incorporate the reweighted group Lasso into block-structured pruning for optimization. Besides the significantly reduced weight storage and computation, the proposed approach achieves high compression rates. Experimental results on different models (BERT, RoBERTa, and DistilBERT) on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark tasks show that we achieve up to 5.0x with zero or minor accuracy degradation on certain task(s). Our proposed method is also orthogonal to existing compact pre-trained language models such as DistilBERT using knowledge distillation, since a further 1.79x average compression rate can be achieved on top of DistilBERT with zero or minor accuracy degradation. It is suitable to deploy the final compressed model on resource-constrained edge devices.
Amazon.com Inc.（亚马逊公司）；AWS Arizona State University（亚马逊云服务亚利桑那州立大学）；Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）
Deploying complex deep learning models on edge devices is challenging because they have substantial compute and memory resource requirements, whereas edge devices' resource budget is limited. To solve this problem, extensive pruning techniques have been proposed for compressing networks. Recent advances based on the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH) show that iterative model pruning tends to produce smaller and more accurate models. However, LTH research focuses on unstructured pruning, which is hardware-inefficient and difficult to accelerate on hardware platforms. In this paper, we investigate…
Unstructured neural network pruning algorithms have achieved impressive compression rates. However, the resulting - typically irregular - sparse matrices hamper efficient hardware implementations, leading to additional memory usage and complex control logic that diminishes the benefits of unstructured pruning. This has spurred structured coarse-grained pruning solutions that prune entire filters or even layers, enabling efficient implementation at the expense of reduced flexibility. Here we propose a flexible new pruning mechanism that facilitates pruning at different granularities (weights, k…
Qualcomm AI Research（高通人工智能研究院）；University of California, Irvine（加利福尼亚大学尔湾分校）
We present a differentiable joint pruning and quantization (DJPQ) scheme. We frame neural network compression as a joint gradient-based optimization problem, trading off between model pruning and quantization automatically for hardware efficiency. DJPQ incorporates variational information bottleneck based structured pruning and mixed-bit precision quantization into a single differentiable loss function. In contrast to previous works which consider pruning and quantization separately, our method enables users to find the optimal trade-off between both in a single training procedure. To utilize …
Pruning is a promising approach to compress deep learning models in order to deploy them on resource-constrained edge devices. However, many existing pruning solutions are based on unstructured pruning, which yields models that cannot efficiently run on commodity hardware; and they often require users to manually explore and tune the pruning process, which is time-consuming and often leads to sub-optimal results. To address these limitations, this paper presents Automatic Attention Pruning (AAP), an adaptive, attention-based, structured pruning approach to automatically generate small, accurat…
Fluctuation-based Adaptive Structured Pruning for Large Language Models
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Wuhan AI Research（武汉人工智能研究院）；Objecteye Inc.（Objecteye公司）
College of William and Mary（威廉与玛丽学院）；Northeastern University（东北大学）
High-end mobile platforms rapidly serve as primary computing devices for a wide range of Deep Neural Network (DNN) applications. However, the constrained computation and storage resources on these devices still pose significant challenges for real-time DNN inference executions. To address this problem, we propose a set of hardware-friendly structured model pruning and compiler optimization techniques to accelerate DNN executions on mobile devices. This demo shows that these optimizations can enable real-time mobile execution of multiple DNN applications, including style transfer, DNN coloring …
Northeastern University（东北大学）；College of William and Mary（威廉与玛丽学院）；Michigan State University（密歇根州立大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Weight pruning is an effective model compression technique to tackle the challenges of achieving real-time deep neural network (DNN) inference on mobile devices. However, prior pruning schemes have limited application scenarios due to accuracy degradation, difficulty in leveraging hardware acceleration, and/or restriction on certain types of DNN layers. In this paper, we propose a general, fine-grained structured pruning scheme and corresponding compiler optimizations that are applicable to any type of DNN layer while achieving high accuracy and hardware inference performance. With the flexibi…
Iterative Structured Pruning for Large Language Models with Multi-Domain Calibration
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学先进交叉学科学院）
Brain-Inspired Efficient Pruning: Exploiting Criticality in Spiking Neural Networks
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Sensetime Research（商汤科技研究院）
We propose the position-based scaled gradient (PSG) that scales the gradient depending on the position of a weight vector to make it more compression-friendly. First, we theoretically show that applying PSG to the standard gradient descent (GD), which is called PSGD, is equivalent to the GD in the warped weight space, a space made by warping the original weight space via an appropriately designed invertible function. Second, we empirically show that PSG acting as a regularizer to a weight vector is favorable for model compression domains such as quantization and pruning. PSG reduces the gap be…
The sheer size of modern neural networks makes model serving a serious computational challenge. A popular class of compression techniques overcomes this challenge by pruning or sparsifying the weights of pretrained networks. While useful, these techniques often face serious tradeoffs between computational requirements and compression quality. In this work, we propose a novel optimization-based pruning framework that considers the combined effect of pruning (and updating) multiple weights subject to a sparsity constraint. Our approach, CHITA, extends the classical Optimal Brain Surgeon framewor…
Recent years have seen a paradigm shift towards multi-task learning. This calls for memory and energy-efficient solutions for inference in a multi-task scenario. We propose an algorithm-hardware co-design approach called MIME. MIME reuses the weight parameters of a trained parent task and learns task-specific threshold parameters for inference on multiple child tasks. We find that MIME results in highly memory-efficient DRAM storage of neural-network parameters for multiple tasks compared to conventional multi-task inference. In addition, MIME results in input-dependent dynamic neuronal prunin…
We present a post-training weight pruning method for deep neural networks that achieves accuracy levels tolerable for the production setting and that is sufficiently fast to be run on commodity hardware such as desktop CPUs or edge devices. We propose a data-free extension of the approach for computer vision models based on automatically-generated synthetic fractal images. We obtain state-of-the-art results for data-free neural network pruning, with ~1.5% top@1 accuracy drop for a ResNet50 on ImageNet at 50% sparsity rate. When using real data, we are able to get a ResNet50 model on ImageNet w…
Deep neural networks are typically too computationally expensive to run in real-time on consumer-grade hardware and low-powered devices. In this paper, we investigate reducing the computational and memory requirements of neural networks through network pruning and quantisation. We examine their efficacy on large networks like AlexNet compared to recent compact architectures: ShuffleNet and MobileNet. Our results show that pruning and quantisation compresses these networks to less than half their original size and improves their efficiency, particularly on MobileNet with a 7x speedup. We also d…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are the key to the state-of-the-art machine vision, sensor fusion and audio/video signal processing. Unfortunately, their computation complexity and tight resource constraints on the Edge make them hard to leverage on mobile, embedded and IoT devices. Due to great diversity of Edge devices, DNN designers have to take into account the hardware platform and application requirements during network training. In this work we introduce pruning via matrix pivoting as a way to improve network pruning by compromising between the design flexibility of architecture-oblivious a…
Large deep neural network (DNN) models pose the key challenge to energy efficiency due to the significantly higher energy consumption of off-chip DRAM accesses than arithmetic or SRAM operations. It motivates the intensive research on model compression with two main approaches. Weight pruning leverages the redundancy in the number of weights and can be performed in a non-structured, which has higher flexibility and pruning rate but incurs index accesses due to irregular weights, or structured manner, which preserves the full matrix structure with lower pruning rate. Weight quantization leverag…
Boost Vision Transformer with GPU-Friendly Sparsity and Quantization
Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程与应用技术研究院）；NVIDIA Corporation（英伟达公司）；School for Information Science and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学信息科学与工程学院）
Pruning, the task of sparsifying deep neural networks, received increasing attention recently. Although state-of-the-art pruning methods extract highly sparse models, they neglect two main challenges: (1) the process of finding these sparse models is often very expensive; (2) unstructured pruning does not provide benefits in terms of GPU memory, training time, or carbon emissions. We propose Early Compression via Gradient Flow Preservation (EarlyCroP), which efficiently extracts state-of-the-art sparse models before or early in training addressing challenge (1), and can be applied in a structu…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
Network compression is crucial to making the deep networks to be more efficient, faster, and generalizable to low-end hardware. Current network compression methods have two open problems: first, there lacks a theoretical framework to estimate the maximum compression rate; second, some layers may get over-prunned, resulting in significant network performance drop. To solve these two problems, this study propose a gradient-matrix singularity analysis-based method to estimate the maximum network redundancy. Guided by that maximum rate, a novel and efficient hierarchical network pruning algorithm …
Structured weight pruning is a representative model compression technique of DNNs for hardware efficiency and inference accelerations. Previous works in this area leave great space for improvement since sparse structures with combinations of different structured pruning schemes are not exploited fully and efficiently. To mitigate the limitations, we propose SS-Auto, a single-shot, automatic structured pruning framework that can achieve row pruning and column pruning simultaneously. We adopt soft constraint-based formulation to alleviate the strong non-convexity of l0-norm constraints used in s…
Argonne Leadership Computing Facility（阿贡领导力计算设施）；Argonne National Laboratories（阿贡国家实验室）
Bayesian neural Networks (BNNs) are a promising method of obtaining statistical uncertainties for neural network predictions but with a higher computational overhead which can limit their practical usage. This work explores the use of high performance computing with distributed training to address the challenges of training BNNs at scale. We present a performance and scalability comparison of training the VGG-16 and Resnet-18 models on a Cray-XC40 cluster. We demonstrate that network pruning can speed up inference without accuracy loss and provide an open source software package, {\it{BPrune}}…
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory（费米国家加速器实验室）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Xilinx Research（赛灵思研究院）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
Efficient machine learning implementations optimized for inference in hardware have wide-ranging benefits, depending on the application, from lower inference latency to higher data throughput and reduced energy consumption. Two popular techniques for reducing computation in neural networks are pruning, removing insignificant synapses, and quantization, reducing the precision of the calculations. In this work, we explore the interplay between pruning and quantization during the training of neural networks for ultra low latency applications targeting high energy physics use cases. Techniques dev…
