Improving Task-Agnostic BERT Distillation with Layer Mapping Search

no code implementations • 11 Dec 2020 • Xiaoqi Jiao, Huating Chang, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Xiao Chen, Linlin Li, Fang Wang, Qun Liu

Comprehensive experiments on the evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that 1) layer mapping strategy has a significant effect on task-agnostic BERT distillation and different layer mappings can result in quite different performances; 2) the optimal layer mapping strategy from the proposed search process consistently outperforms the other heuristic ones; 3) with the optimal layer mapping, our student model achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GLUE tasks.

Knowledge Distillation