The development of over-parameterized pre-trained language models has made a significant contribution toward the success of natural language processing. While over-parameterization of these models is the key to their generalization power, it makes them unsuitable for deployment on low-capacity devices. We push the limits of state-of-the-art Transformer-based pre-trained language model compression using Kronecker decomposition. We present our KroneckerBERT, a compressed version of the BERT_BASE model obtained by compressing the embedding layer and the linear mappings in the multi-head attention, and the feed-forward network modules in the Transformer layers. Our KroneckerBERT is trained via a very efficient two-stage knowledge distillation scheme using far fewer data samples than state-of-the-art models like MobileBERT and TinyBERT. We evaluate the performance of KroneckerBERT on well-known NLP benchmarks. We show that our KroneckerBERT with compression factors of 7.7x and 21x outperforms state-of-the-art compression methods on the GLUE and SQuAD benchmarks. In particular, using only 13% of the teacher model parameters, it retain more than 99% of the accuracy on the majority of GLUE tasks.

GPT is an auto-regressive Transformer-based pre-trained language model which has attracted a lot of attention in the natural language processing (NLP) domain. The success of GPT is mostly attributed to its pre-training on huge amount of data and its large number of parameters. Despite the superior performance of GPT, this overparameterized nature of GPT can be very prohibitive for deploying this model on devices with limited computational power or memory. This problem can be mitigated using model compression techniques; however, compressing GPT models has not been investigated much in the literature. In this work, we use Kronecker decomposition to compress the linear mappings of the GPT-2 model. Our Kronecker GPT-2 model (KnGPT2) is initialized based on the Kronecker decomposed version of the GPT-2 model and then is undergone a very light pre- training on only a small portion of the training data with intermediate layer knowledge distillation (ILKD). Finally, our KnGPT2 is fine-tuned on downstream tasks using ILKD as well. We evaluate our model on both language modeling and General Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark tasks and show that with more efficient pre-training and similar number of parameters, our KnGPT2 outperforms the existing DistilGPT2 model significantly.