DE$^3$-BERT: Distance-Enhanced Early Exiting for BERT based on Prototypical Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Jianing, Zhang, Qi, Ding, Weiping, Miao, Duoqian, Zhao, Jun, Hu, Liang, Cao, Longbing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author He, Jianing
Zhang, Qi
Ding, Weiping
Miao, Duoqian
Zhao, Jun
Hu, Liang
Cao, Longbing
author_facet He, Jianing
Zhang, Qi
Ding, Weiping
Miao, Duoqian
Zhao, Jun
Hu, Liang
Cao, Longbing
contents Early exiting has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of pre-trained language models like BERT by dynamically adjusting the number of layers executed. However, most existing early exiting methods only consider local information from an individual test sample to determine their exiting indicators, failing to leverage the global information offered by sample population. This leads to suboptimal estimation of prediction correctness, resulting in erroneous exiting decisions. To bridge the gap, we explore the necessity of effectively combining both local and global information to ensure reliable early exiting during inference. Purposefully, we leverage prototypical networks to learn class prototypes and devise a distance metric between samples and class prototypes. This enables us to utilize global information for estimating the correctness of early predictions. On this basis, we propose a novel Distance-Enhanced Early Exiting framework for BERT (DE$^3$-BERT). DE$^3$-BERT implements a hybrid exiting strategy that supplements classic entropy-based local information with distance-based global information to enhance the estimation of prediction correctness for more reliable early exiting decisions. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that DE$^3$-BERT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models under different speed-up ratios with minimal storage or computational overhead, yielding a better trade-off between model performance and inference efficiency. Additionally, an in-depth analysis further validates the generality and interpretability of our method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_05948
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DE$^3$-BERT: Distance-Enhanced Early Exiting for BERT based on Prototypical Networks
He, Jianing
Zhang, Qi
Ding, Weiping
Miao, Duoqian
Zhao, Jun
Hu, Liang
Cao, Longbing
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Early exiting has demonstrated its effectiveness in accelerating the inference of pre-trained language models like BERT by dynamically adjusting the number of layers executed. However, most existing early exiting methods only consider local information from an individual test sample to determine their exiting indicators, failing to leverage the global information offered by sample population. This leads to suboptimal estimation of prediction correctness, resulting in erroneous exiting decisions. To bridge the gap, we explore the necessity of effectively combining both local and global information to ensure reliable early exiting during inference. Purposefully, we leverage prototypical networks to learn class prototypes and devise a distance metric between samples and class prototypes. This enables us to utilize global information for estimating the correctness of early predictions. On this basis, we propose a novel Distance-Enhanced Early Exiting framework for BERT (DE$^3$-BERT). DE$^3$-BERT implements a hybrid exiting strategy that supplements classic entropy-based local information with distance-based global information to enhance the estimation of prediction correctness for more reliable early exiting decisions. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that DE$^3$-BERT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models under different speed-up ratios with minimal storage or computational overhead, yielding a better trade-off between model performance and inference efficiency. Additionally, an in-depth analysis further validates the generality and interpretability of our method.
title DE$^3$-BERT: Distance-Enhanced Early Exiting for BERT based on Prototypical Networks
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05948