Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning

Ting Jiang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Ruobing Xie, Feng Xia


Abstract
To overcome the overparameterized problem in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs), pruning is widely used as a simple and straightforward compression method by directly removing unimportant weights. Previous first-order methods successfully compress PLMs to extremely high sparsity with little performance drop. These methods, such as movement pruning, use first-order information to prune PLMs while fine-tuning the remaining weights. In this work, we argue fine-tuning is redundant for first-order pruning, since first-order pruning is sufficient to converge PLMs to downstream tasks without fine-tuning. Under this motivation, we propose Static Model Pruning (SMP), which only uses first-order pruning to adapt PLMs to downstream tasks while achieving the target sparsity level. In addition, we also design a new masking function and training objective to further improve SMP. Extensive experiments at various sparsity levels show SMP has significant improvements over first-order and zero-order methods. Unlike previous first-order methods, SMP is also applicable to low sparsity and outperforms zero-order methods. Meanwhile, SMP is more parameter efficient than other methods due to it does not require fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.35
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
594–605
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.35
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.35
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ting Jiang, Deqing Wang, Fuzhen Zhuang, Ruobing Xie, and Feng Xia. 2023. Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 594–605, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pruning Pre-trained Language Models Without Fine-Tuning (Jiang et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.35.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.35.mp4