Binary and Ternary Natural Language Generation
Authors: name: Zechun Liu, name: Barlas Oguz, name: Aasish Pappu, name: Yangyang Shi, name: Raghuraman Krishnamoorthi

Ternary and binary neural networks enable multiplication-free computation and
promise multiple orders of magnitude efficiency gains over full-precision
networks if implemented on specialized hardware. However, since both the
parameter and the output space are highly discretized, such networks have
proven very difficult to optimize. The difficulties are compounded for the
class of transformer text generation models due to the sensitivity of the
attention operation to quantization and the noise-compounding effects of
autoregressive decoding in the high-cardinality output space. We approach the
problem with a mix of statistics-based quantization for the weights and elastic
quantization of the activations and demonstrate the first ternary and binary
transformer models on the downstream tasks of summarization and machine
translation. Our ternary BART base achieves an R1 score of 41 on the
CNN/DailyMail benchmark, which is merely 3.9 points behind the full model while
being 16x more efficient. Our binary model, while less accurate, achieves a
highly non-trivial score of 35.6. For machine translation, we achieved BLEU
scores of 21.7 and 17.6 on the WMT16 En-Ro benchmark, compared with a full
precision mBART model score of 26.8. We also compare our approach in the 8-bit
activation setting, where our ternary and even binary weight models can match
or outperform the best existing 8-bit weight models in the literature. Our code
and models are available at:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/Ternary_Binary_Transformer