# A Win-win Deal: Towards Sparse and Robust Pre-trained Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05211 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05211/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 57 of its 77 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Oct 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [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)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Explaining and Harnessing Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6572/) (2014)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.05426/) (2017)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Estimating or Propagating Gradients Through Stochastic Neurons for Conditional Computation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1308.3432/) (2013)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Energy and Policy Considerations for Deep Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02243/) (2019)
- [TinyBERT: Distilling BERT for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.10351/) (2019)
- [Right for the Wrong Reasons: Diagnosing Syntactic Heuristics in Natural Language Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01007/) (2019)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [Annotation Artifacts in Natural Language Inference Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02324/) (2018)
- [Recognition in Terra Incognita](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.04975/) (2018)
- [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01878/) (2017)
- [Patient Knowledge Distillation for BERT Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09355/) (2019)
- [The State of Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09574/) (2019)
- [Movement Pruning: Adaptive Sparsity by Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.07683/) (2020)
- [PAWS: Paraphrase Adversaries from Word Scrambling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01130/) (2019)
- [Don't Just Assume; Look and Answer: Overcoming Priors for Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00377/) (2017)
- [Q8BERT: Quantized 8Bit BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06188/) (2019)
- [Pretrained Transformers Improve Out-of-Distribution Robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06100/) (2020)
- [Don't Take the Easy Way Out: Ensemble Based Methods for Avoiding Known Dataset Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.03683/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Pre-trained BERT Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12223/) (2020)
- [Advances in Pre-Training Distributed Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.09405/) (2017)
- [Compressing BERT: Studying the Effects of Weight Pruning on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08307/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Task-Specific Skill Localization in Fine-tuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.06600/) (2023)
- [UPop: Unified and Progressive Pruning for Compressing Vision-Language Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13741/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning Finetunes Small Subnetworks in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.11711/) (2025)
- [Robust Natural Language Understanding with Residual Attention Debiasing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17627/) (2023)
- [Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tunes a Sparse Subnetwork in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.17107/) (2025)
- [Not Eliminate but Aggregate: Post-Hoc Control over Mixture-of-Experts to Address Shortcut Shifts in Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12060/) (2024)
- [Advantageous Parameter Expansion Training Makes Better Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.24241/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the remarkable success of pre-trained language models (PLMs), they still face two challenges: First, large-scale PLMs are inefficient in terms of memory footprint and computation. Second, on the downstream tasks, PLMs tend to rely on the dataset bias and struggle to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. In response to the efficiency problem, recent studies show that dense PLMs can be replaced with sparse subnetworks without hurting the performance. Such subnetworks can be found in three scenarios: 1) the fine-tuned PLMs, 2) the raw PLMs and then fine-tuned in isolation, and even inside 3) PLMs without any parameter fine-tuning. However, these results are only obtained in the in-distribution (ID) setting. In this paper, we extend the study on PLMs subnetworks to the OOD setting, investigating whether sparsity and robustness to dataset bias can be achieved simultaneously. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments with the pre-trained BERT model on three natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Our results demonstrate that sparse and robust subnetworks (SRNets) can consistently be found in BERT, across the aforementioned three scenarios, using different training and compression methods. Furthermore, we explore the upper bound of SRNets using the OOD information and show that there exist sparse and almost unbiased BERT subnetworks. Finally, we present 1) an analytical study that provides insights on how to promote the efficiency of SRNets searching process and 2) a solution to improve subnetworks' performance at high sparsity. The code is available at https://github.com/llyx97/sparse-and-robust-PLM.