Pruning ALBERT transformer for Analog-AI
Emma, Anna, Safia Boulharts
Pruning ALBERT transformer for Analog-AI.
Rel. Carlo Ricciardi. Politecnico di Torino, Master of science program in Nanotechnologies For Icts, 2023
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Abstract
Analog In-Memory Computing enables latency and energy consumption reduction on Deep Neural Network inference and training. The Analog-AI group developed a chip, ARES, capable of computing the Multiply-Accumulate (MAC) operation using Phase Change Memory devices. To demonstrate the performance of the chip, the ALBERT model, a more compact version of the widely known BERT transformer, is currently under experimental study. In this report, a general in-depth analysis of the contributions to the MAC is provided, revealing that some activation/weight pairs assume larger importance, while others can be safely pruned with very limited impact on accuracy. A new row-wise pruning strategy is proposed, followed by fine-tuning, which leads to reduced model size with equivalent accuracy.
The proposed algorithm is then applied on the GLUE task using the ALBERT architecture, demonstrating simulated software- equivalent performance even with consistent weight pruning, potentially enabling several improvements such as reduction of required hardware tiles, superior power performance and simpler model on-chip deployment.
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