[SRW] LECO: Improving Early Exiting via Learned Exits and Comparison-based Exiting Mechanism

Jingfan Zhang, Ming Tan, Pengyu Dai, Wei Zhu

Student Research Workshop Srw Paper

Session 4: Student Research Workshop (Oral)
Conference Room: Pier 2&3
Conference Time: July 11, 11:00-12:00 (EDT) (America/Toronto)
Global Time: July 11, Session 4 (15:00-16:00 UTC)
TLDR: Recently, dynamic early exiting has attracted much attention since it can accelerate the inference speed of pre-trained models (PTMs). However, previous work on early exiting has neglected the intermediate exits' architectural designs. In this work, we propose a novel framework, \underline{L}earned ...
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Abstract: Recently, dynamic early exiting has attracted much attention since it can accelerate the inference speed of pre-trained models (PTMs). However, previous work on early exiting has neglected the intermediate exits' architectural designs. In this work, we propose a novel framework, \underline{L}earned \underline{E}xits and \underline{CO}mparison-based early exiting (LECO) to improve PTMs' early exiting performances. First, to fully uncover the potentials of multi-exit BERT, we design a novel search space for intermediate exits and employ the idea of differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) to design proper exit architectures for different intermediate layers automatically. Second, we propose a simple-yet-effective comparison-based early exiting mechanism (COBEE), which can help PTMs achieve better performance and speedup tradeoffs. Extensive experiments show that our LECO achieves the SOTA performances for multi-exit BERT training and dynamic early exiting.