# Quantize BERT with Quantization Aware Training

## Overview

BERT - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, is a language representation model introduced last year by Devlin et al [1] . It was shown that by fine-tuning a pre-trained BERT model it is possible to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a wide variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications.

In this page we are going to show how to run quantization aware training in the fine tuning phase to a specific task in order to produce a quantized BERT model which simulates quantized inference. In order to utilize quantization for compressing the model’s memory footprint or for accelarating computation, true quantization must be applied using optimized kernels and dedicated hardware.

Note

QuantizedBertModel class does not make use of optimized Integer kernels for quantized Matrix Multiplication. Therefore, we expect that quantized inference will be slower than regular inference since quantization and dequantization operations are added to the unoptimized compute graph.

## Quantization Aware Training

The idea of quantization aware training is to introduce to the model the error caused by quantization while training in order for the model to learn to overcome this error.

In this work we use the quantization scheme and method offered by Jacob et al [2]. At the forward pass we use fake quantization to simulate the quantization error during the forward pass and at the backward pass we estimate the fake quantization gradients using Straight-Through Estimator [3].

## Results

The following table presents our experiments results. In the Quantization Aware Training column we present the relative loss of accuracy w.r.t BERT fine tuned to the specific task. Each result here is an average of 5 experiments. We used BERT-Base architecture and pre-trained model in all the experiments except experiments with -large suffix which use the BERT-Large architecture and pre-trained model.

 Metric BERT baseline accuracy Quantized BERT 8bit Relative Reduction of Accuracy Dataset Size (*1k) CoLA* Matthew’s corr. (mcc) 58.48 58.48 0.00% 8.5 MRPC F1 90 89.56 0.49% 3.5 MRPC-Large F1 90.86 90.9 -0.04% 3.5 QNLI Accuracy 90.3 90.62 -0.35% 108 QNLI-Large Accuracy 91.66 91.74 -0.09% 108 QQP F1 87.84 87.96 -0.14% 363 RTE* Accuracy 69.7 68.78 1.32% 2.5 SST-2 Accuracy 92.36 92.24 0.13% 67 STS-B Pearson corr. 89.62 89.04 0.65% 5.7 STS-B-Large Pearson corr. 90.34 90.12 0.24% 5.7 SQuAD F1 88.46 87.74 0.81% 87

## Running Modalities

In the following instructions for training and inference we use the Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MRPC) which is included in the GLUE benchmark as an example dataset.

### Training

To train Quantized BERT use the following code snippet:

nlp-train transformer_glue \
--model_name_or_path bert-base-uncased \
--model_type quant_bert \
--learning_rate 2e-5 \
--output_dir /tmp/mrpc-8bit \
--evaluate_during_training \
--data_dir /path/to/MRPC \
--do_lower_case

The model is saved at the end of training in 2 files:
1. A model saved in FP32 for further pytorch_model.bin
2. A quantized model for inference only quant_pytorch_model.bin

### Inference

To run inference with a fine tuned quantized BERT use the following code snippet:

nlp-inference transformer_glue \
--model_path /tmp/mrpc-8bit \
--model_type quant_bert \
--output_dir /tmp/mrpc-8bit \
--data_dir /path/to/MRPC \
--do_lower_case \
--overwrite_output_dir

• To run evaluation on the task’s development set add the flag --evaluate to the command line.
• To run the quantized model saved in quant_pytorch_model.bin add the flag --load_quantized_model to the command line.

## References

 [1] Jacob Devlin and Ming-Wei Chang and Kenton Lee and Kristina Toutanova, BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.04805.pdf
 [2] Benoit Jacob and Skirmantas Kligys and Bo Chen and Menglong Zhu and Matthew Tang and Andrew Howard and Hartwig Adam and Dmitry Kalenichenko, Quantization and Training of Neural Networks for Efficient Integer-Arithmetic-Only Inference, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.05877.pdf
 [3] Yoshua Bengio and Nicholas Leonard and Aaron Courville, Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.3432.pdf