# SpeedLimit: Neural Architecture Search for Quantized Transformer Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.12127 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.12127/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [Image Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05751/) (2018)
- [Using DeepSpeed and Megatron to Train Megatron-Turing NLG 530B, A Large-Scale Generative Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11990/) (2022)
- [MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02984/) (2020)
- [Q8BERT: Quantized 8Bit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06188/) (2019)
- [When Vision Transformers Outperform ResNets without Pre-training or Strong Data Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01548/) (2021)
- [I-BERT: Integer-only BERT Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01321/) (2021)
- [Machine Learning at the Network Edge: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00080/) (2019)
- [NAS-BERT: Task-Agnostic and Adaptive-Size BERT Compression with Neural Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14444/) (2021)
- [AutoTinyBERT: Automatic Hyper-parameter Optimization for Efficient Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.13686/) (2021)
- [Joint Neural Architecture Search and Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.09426/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While research in the field of transformer models has primarily focused on enhancing performance metrics such as accuracy and perplexity, practical applications in industry often necessitate a rigorous consideration of inference latency constraints. Addressing this challenge, we introduce SpeedLimit, a novel Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique that optimizes accuracy whilst adhering to an upper-bound latency constraint. Our method incorporates 8-bit integer quantization in the search process to outperform the current state-of-the-art technique. Our results underline the feasibility and efficacy of seeking an optimal balance between performance and latency, providing new avenues for deploying state-of-the-art transformer models in latency-sensitive environments.