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Main Authors: Wang, Maolin, Chu, Jun, Xie, Sicong, Zang, Xiaoling, Zhao, Yao, Zhong, Wenliang, Zhao, Xiangyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04636
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author Wang, Maolin
Chu, Jun
Xie, Sicong
Zang, Xiaoling
Zhao, Yao
Zhong, Wenliang
Zhao, Xiangyu
author_facet Wang, Maolin
Chu, Jun
Xie, Sicong
Zang, Xiaoling
Zhao, Yao
Zhong, Wenliang
Zhao, Xiangyu
contents In the era of mobile computing, deploying efficient Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in resource-restricted edge settings presents significant challenges, particularly in environments requiring strict privacy compliance, real-time responsiveness, and diverse multi-tasking capabilities. These challenges create a fundamental need for ultra-compact models that maintain strong performance across various NLP tasks while adhering to stringent memory constraints. To this end, we introduce Edge ultra-lIte BERT framework (EI-BERT) with a novel cross-distillation method. EI-BERT efficiently compresses models through a comprehensive pipeline including hard token pruning, cross-distillation and parameter quantization. Specifically, the cross-distillation method uniquely positions the teacher model to understand the student model's perspective, ensuring efficient knowledge transfer through parameter integration and the mutual interplay between models. Through extensive experiments, we achieve a remarkably compact BERT-based model of only 1.91 MB - the smallest to date for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. This ultra-compact model has been successfully deployed across multiple scenarios within the Alipay ecosystem, demonstrating significant improvements in real-world applications. For example, it has been integrated into Alipay's live Edge Recommendation system since January 2024, currently serving the app's recommendation traffic across \textbf{8.4 million daily active devices}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Put Teacher in Student's Shoes: Cross-Distillation for Ultra-compact Model Compression Framework
Wang, Maolin
Chu, Jun
Xie, Sicong
Zang, Xiaoling
Zhao, Yao
Zhong, Wenliang
Zhao, Xiangyu
Computation and Language
In the era of mobile computing, deploying efficient Natural Language Processing (NLP) models in resource-restricted edge settings presents significant challenges, particularly in environments requiring strict privacy compliance, real-time responsiveness, and diverse multi-tasking capabilities. These challenges create a fundamental need for ultra-compact models that maintain strong performance across various NLP tasks while adhering to stringent memory constraints. To this end, we introduce Edge ultra-lIte BERT framework (EI-BERT) with a novel cross-distillation method. EI-BERT efficiently compresses models through a comprehensive pipeline including hard token pruning, cross-distillation and parameter quantization. Specifically, the cross-distillation method uniquely positions the teacher model to understand the student model's perspective, ensuring efficient knowledge transfer through parameter integration and the mutual interplay between models. Through extensive experiments, we achieve a remarkably compact BERT-based model of only 1.91 MB - the smallest to date for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks. This ultra-compact model has been successfully deployed across multiple scenarios within the Alipay ecosystem, demonstrating significant improvements in real-world applications. For example, it has been integrated into Alipay's live Edge Recommendation system since January 2024, currently serving the app's recommendation traffic across \textbf{8.4 million daily active devices}.
title Put Teacher in Student's Shoes: Cross-Distillation for Ultra-compact Model Compression Framework
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04636