BERT Miniatures

This is the set of 24 BERT models referenced in Well-Read Students Learn Better: On the Importance of Pre-training Compact Models (English only, uncased, trained with WordPiece masking).

We have shown that the standard BERT recipe (including model architecture and training objective) is effective on a wide range of model sizes, beyond BERT-Base and BERT-Large. The smaller BERT models are intended for environments with restricted computational resources. They can be fine-tuned in the same manner as the original BERT models. However, they are most effective in the context of knowledge distillation, where the fine-tuning labels are produced by a larger and more accurate teacher.

Our goal is to enable research in institutions with fewer computational resources and encourage the community to seek directions of innovation alternative to increasing model capacity.

You can download the 24 BERT miniatures either from the official BERT Github page, or via HuggingFace from the links below:

Note that the BERT-Base model in this release is included for completeness only; it was re-trained under the same regime as the original model.

Here are the corresponding GLUE scores on the test set:

For each task, we selected the best fine-tuning hyperparameters from the lists below, and trained for 4 epochs:

• batch sizes: 8, 16, 32, 64, 128
• learning rates: 3e-4, 1e-4, 5e-5, 3e-5

If you use these models, please cite the following paper:

@article{turc2019,
  title={Well-Read Students Learn Better: On the Importance of Pre-training Compact Models},
  author={Turc, Iulia and Chang, Ming-Wei and Lee, Kenton and Toutanova, Kristina},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08962v2 },
  year={2019}
}