MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices

Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved great success by using huge pre-trained models with hundreds of millions of parameters. However, these models suffer from heavy model sizes and high latency such that they cannot be deployed to resourcelimited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose MobileBERT for compressing and accelerating the popular BERT model. Like the original BERT, MobileBERT is task-agnostic, that is, it can be generically applied to various downstream NLP tasks via simple fine-tuning. Basically, MobileBERT is a thin version of BERT LARGE , while equipped with bottleneck structures and a carefully designed balance between self-attentions and feed-forward networks. To train…