NASH: A Simple Unified Framework of Structured Pruning for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Language Models

Jongwoo Ko, Seungjoon Park, Yujin Kim, Sumyeong Ahn, Du-Seong Chang, Euijai Ahn, Se-Young Yun


Abstract
Structured pruning methods have proven effective in reducing the model size and accelerating inference speed in various network architectures such as Transformers. Despite the versatility of encoder-decoder models in numerous NLP tasks, the structured pruning methods on such models are relatively less explored compared to encoder-only models. In this study, we investigate the behavior of the structured pruning of the encoder-decoder models in the decoupled pruning perspective of the encoder and decoder component, respectively. Our findings highlight two insights: (1) the number of decoder layers is the dominant factor of inference speed, and (2) low sparsity in the pruned encoder network enhances generation quality. Motivated by these findings, we propose a simple and effective framework, NASH, that narrows the encoder and shortens the decoder networks of encoder-decoder models. Extensive experiments on diverse generation and inference tasks validate the effectiveness of our method in both speedup and output quality.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.404
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6076–6093
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.404
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.404
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jongwoo Ko, Seungjoon Park, Yujin Kim, Sumyeong Ahn, Du-Seong Chang, Euijai Ahn, and Se-Young Yun. 2023. NASH: A Simple Unified Framework of Structured Pruning for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 6076–6093, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
NASH: A Simple Unified Framework of Structured Pruning for Accelerating Encoder-Decoder Language Models (Ko et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.404.pdf