MobileNMT: Enabling Translation in 15MB and 30ms
Authors: name: Ye Lin, name: Xiaohui Wang, name: Zhexi Zhang, name: Mingxuan Wang, name: Tong Xiao, name: Jingbo Zhu

Deploying NMT models on mobile devices is essential for privacy, low latency,
and offline scenarios. For high model capacity, NMT models are rather large.
Running these models on devices is challenging with limited storage, memory,
computation, and power consumption. Existing work either only focuses on a
single metric such as FLOPs or general engine which is not good at
auto-regressive decoding. In this paper, we present MobileNMT, a system that
can translate in 15MB and 30ms on devices. We propose a series of principles
for model compression when combined with quantization. Further, we implement an
engine that is friendly to INT8 and decoding. With the co-design of model and
engine, compared with the existing system, we speed up 47.0x and save 99.5% of
memory with only 11.6% loss of BLEU. The code is publicly available at
https://github.com/zjersey/Lightseq-ARM.