# Probing Structured Pruning on Multilingual Pre-trained Models: Settings, Algorithms, and Efficiency

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.02601 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02601/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 39 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 39)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Cross-lingual Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.07291/) (2019)
- [XNLI: Evaluating Cross-lingual Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.05053/) (2018)
- [Analyzing Multi-Head Self-Attention: Specialized Heads Do the Heavy Lifting, the Rest Can Be Pruned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09418/) (2019)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [XTREME: A Massively Multilingual Multi-task Benchmark for Evaluating Cross-lingual Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11080/) (2020)
- [Learning Sparse Neural Networks through L0 Regularization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01312/) (2017)
- [On the Cross-lingual Transferability of Monolingual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11856/) (2019)
- [CCNet: Extracting High Quality Monolingual Datasets from Web Crawl Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00359/) (2019)
- [Sparsity in Deep Learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00554/) (2021)
- [TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05002/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [MLQA: Evaluating Cross-lingual Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07475/) (2019)
- [DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12993/) (2020)
- [PAWS-X: A Cross-lingual Adversarial Dataset for Paraphrase Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.11828/) (2019)
- [DynaBERT: Dynamic BERT with Adaptive Width and Depth](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04037/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00089/) (2019)
- [Structured Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04732/) (2019)
- [HAT: Hardware-Aware Transformers for Efficient Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14187/) (2020)
- [The Right Tool for the Job: Matching Model and Instance Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07453/) (2020)
- [On the Effect of Dropping Layers of Pre-trained Transformer Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03844/) (2020)
- [When BERT Plays the Lottery, All Tickets Are Winning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00561/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Examining Modularity in Multilingual LMs via Language-Specialized Subnetworks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08273/) (2023)
- [Gradient-based Intra-attention Pruning on Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.07634/) (2022)
- [Multilingual Text Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00949/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Structured pruning has been extensively studied on monolingual pre-trained language models and is yet to be fully evaluated on their multilingual counterparts. This work investigates three aspects of structured pruning on multilingual pre-trained language models: settings, algorithms, and efficiency. Experiments on nine downstream tasks show several counter-intuitive phenomena: for settings, individually pruning for each language does not induce a better result; for algorithms, the simplest method performs the best; for efficiency, a fast model does not imply that it is also small. To facilitate the comparison on all sparsity levels, we present Dynamic Sparsification, a simple approach that allows training the model once and adapting to different model sizes at inference. We hope this work fills the gap in the study of structured pruning on multilingual pre-trained models and sheds light on future research.