Cited by 758Topic ModelingAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

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

Open access
Sun, Zhiqing, Yu, Hongkun, Song, Xiaodan, Liu, Renjie, Yang, Yiming, Zhou, Denny·2020·Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

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 MobileBERT, we first train a specially designed teacher model, an invertedbottleneck incorporated BERT LARGE model.Then, we conduct knowledge transfer from this teacher to MobileBERT.Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3× smaller and 5.5× faster than BERT BASE while achieving competitive results on well-known benchmarks.On the natural language inference tasks of GLUE, MobileBERT achieves a GLUE score of 77.7 (0.6 lower than BERT BASE ), and 62 ms latency on a Pixel 4 phone.On the SQuAD v1.1/v2.0question answering task, MobileBERT achieves a dev F1 score of 90.0/79.2(1.5/2.1 higher than BERT BASE ).

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.195

Cites

72 of 72 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • MobileBERT is 4.3× smaller and 5.5× faster than the general BERT model.

    “To train MobileBERT, first the authors trained a specially designed teacher model, and then, they transferred the knowledge from the teacher to MobileBERT, which is 4.3× smaller and 5.5× faster than the general BERT model.”

    From A Review on Deep-Learning-Based Cyberbullying Detection (2023) · cites this paper as [57]

  • The distilled MobileBERT model is 4.3 times smaller than the BERT-base network and 5.5 times faster on a Pixel 4 mobile phone.

    “The distilled MobileBERT model is 4.3 × smaller than the BERT-base network and 5.5 × faster on a Pixel 4 mobile phone.”

    From A Survey of Techniques for Optimizing Transformer Inference (2023) · cites this paper as [67]

  • MobileBERT runs 5.5 times faster than the BERT-base model on a Pixel 4 mobile phone.

    “MobileBERT [67] is a compressed version of the BERT-base model, and it runs 5.5 ×”

    From A Survey of Techniques for Optimizing Transformer Inference (2023) · cites this paper as [67]

  • Models such as MobileBERT and SqueezeBERT employ bottleneck layers and grouped convolutions, leading to a 3× to 4× reduction in latency while maintaining >90% of the original model's accuracy.

    “Moreover, models such as MobileBERT and SqueezeBERT employ bottleneck layers and grouped convolutions, leading to a 3× to 4× reduction in latency while maintaining >90% of the original model’s accuracy.”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. William B Dolan and Chris. Brockett. 2005. Auto- matically constructing a corpus of sentential para- phrases. In Proceedings of the International Work- shop on Paraphrasing. 7 https://tensorflow.org/lite/models/ bert_qa/overview
  2. Ganesh Jawahar, Benoît Sagot, Djamé Seddah, Samuel Unicomb, Gerardo Iñiguez, Márton Karsai, Yannick Léo, Márton Karsai, Carlos Sarraute, Éric Fleury, et al. 2019. What does bert learn about the structure of language? In 57th Annual Meeting of the Associa- tion for Computational Linguistics (ACL), Florence, Italy.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Sun, Z., Yu, H., Song, X., Liu, R., Yang, Y., & Zhou, D.
Affiliations
Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Venue
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Published
2020
Pages
2158-2170
ISSN
0736-587X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3034457371
Cited by
757
References
54
Citations by year
2026: 94 · 2025: 134 · 2024: 98 · 2023: 128 · 2022: 119 · 2021: 140 · 2020: 43 · 2019: 1
FWCI
41.07
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Proceedings of the conference - Association for Computational Linguistics. Meeting (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
MobileBERT, BERT, model compression, knowledge distillation, teacher-student learning, self-attention, feedforward neural networks, mobile devices, resource-constrained deployment, natural language inference, question answering, adhesives, SQuAD

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review