Cited by 114Advanced Neural Network ApplicationsTopic ModelingNatural Language Processing Techniques

SqueezeBERT: What can computer vision teach NLP about efficient neural networks?

Open access
Iandola, Forrest, Shaw, Albert, Krishna, Ravi, Keutzer, Kurt·2020·Proceedings of SustaiNLP: Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing

Abstract

Humans read and write hundreds of billions of messages every day.Further, due to the availability of large datasets, large computing systems, and better neural network models, natural language processing (NLP) technology has made significant strides in understanding, proofreading, and organizing these messages.Thus, there is a significant opportunity to deploy NLP in myriad applications to help web users, social networks, and businesses.Toward this end, we consider smartphones and other mobile devices as crucial platforms for deploying NLP models at scale.However, today's highly-accurate NLP neural network models such as BERT and RoBERTa are extremely computationally expensive, with BERT-base taking 1.7 seconds to classify a text snippet on a Pixel 3 smartphone.To begin to address this problem, we draw inspiration from the computer vision community, where work such as MobileNet has demonstrated that grouped convolutions (e.g., depthwise convolutions) can enable speedups without sacrificing accuracy.We demonstrate how to replace several operations in self-attention layers with grouped convolutions and use this technique in a novel network architecture called Squeeze-BERT, which runs 4.3x faster than BERT-base on the Pixel 3 while achieving competitive accuracy on the GLUE test set.A PyTorch-based implementation of Squeeze-BERT is available as part of the Hugging Face Transformers library: https:// huggingface.co/squeezebert

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.sustainlp-1.17

Cites

87 of 87 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?

  • 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: 3

  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.
  2. Zhanghao Wu, Zhijian Liu, Ji Lin, Yujun Lin, and Song Han. 2020. Lite transformer with long short term attention. In ICLR.
  3. Ji Xin, Raphael Tang, Jaejun Lee, Yaoliang Yu, and Jimmy Lin. 2020. Deebert: Dynamic early exiting for accelerating bert inference. In ACL.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Iandola, F., Shaw, A., Krishna, R., & Keutzer, K.
Affiliations
University of California, Berkeley (US)
Venue
Proceedings of SustaiNLP: Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing
Published
2020
Pages
124-135
OpenAlex
W3036463250
Cited by
114
References
77
Citations by year
2026: 6 · 2025: 15 · 2024: 10 · 2023: 30 · 2022: 21 · 2021: 27 · 2020: 5
FWCI
6.40
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by
Locations
  • Workshop on Simple and Efficient Natural Language Processing (SustaiNLP) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
Samsung
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Advanced Neural Network Applications
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
Keywords
efficient neural networks, group convolution, depthwise convolution, self-attention, BERT, RoBERTa, mobile deployment, computational efficiency, GLUE benchmark

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