Increasing model size when pretraining natural language representations often results in improved performance on downstream tasks. However, at some point further model increases become harder due to GPU/TPU memory limitations, longer training times, and unexpected model degradation. To address these problems, we present two parameter-reduction techniques to lower memory consumption and increase the training speed of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019). Comprehensive empirical evidence shows that our proposed methods lead to models that scale much better compared to the original BERT. We also use a self-supervised loss that focuses on modeling inter-sentence coherence, and show it consistently helps downstream tasks with multi-sentence inputs. As a result, our best model establishes new state-of-the-art results on the GLUE, RACE, and SQuAD benchmarks while having fewer parameters compared to BERT-large.
Another concurrent work, AlBERT REF leverages crosslayer parameter sharing to speed up the training and achieves new state-of-the-art results with 233M parameters.
ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations
ArXiv
ArXiv
Computer Science