@inproceedings{ren-zhu-2023-pruning,
    title = "Pruning Pre-trained Language Models with Principled Importance and Self-regularization",
    author = "Ren, Siyu  and
      Zhu, Kenny",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.573",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.573",
    pages = "8995--9008",
    abstract = "Iterative pruning is one of the most effective compression methods for pre-trained language models. We discovered that finding the optimal pruning decision is an equality-constrained 0-1 Integer Linear Programming problem. The solution to this optimization problem leads to a principled importance criterion which we use to rank parameters during iterative model pruning. To mitigate the poor generalization at high sparsity levels, we propose a self-regularization scheme where model prediction is regularized by the latest checkpoint with increasing sparsity throughout pruning. Our experiments on natural language understanding, question answering, named entity recognition, and data-to-text generation with various Transformer-based PLMs show the effectiveness of the approach at various sparsity levels.",
}

Iterative pruning is one of the most effective compression methods for pre-trained language models. We discovered that finding the optimal pruning decision is an equality-constrained 0-1 Integer Linear Programming problem. The solution to this optimization problem leads to a principled importance criterion which we use to rank parameters during iterative model pruning. To mitigate the poor generalization at high sparsity levels, we propose a self-regularization scheme where model prediction is regularized by the latest checkpoint with increasing sparsity throughout pruning. Our experiments on natural language understanding, question answering, named entity recognition, and data-to-text generation with various Transformer-based PLMs show the effectiveness of the approach at various sparsity levels.
Ren, Siyu Zhu, Kenny
Pruning Pre-trained Language Models with Principled Importance and Self-regularization