# DPBERT: Efficient Inference for BERT based on Dynamic Planning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00108 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00108/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2023.

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

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [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)
- [GLUE: A Multi-Task Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Natural Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07461/) (2018)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.08237/) (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)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [Aligning Books and Movies: Towards Story-like Visual Explanations by Watching Movies and Reading Books](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.06724/) (2015)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08983/) (2016)
- [Reducing Transformer Depth on Demand with Structured Dropout](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11556/) (2019)
- [Q-BERT: Hessian Based Ultra Low Precision Quantization of BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05840/) (2019)
- [SkipNet: Learning Dynamic Routing in Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09485/) (2017)
- [DeeBERT: Dynamic Early Exiting for Accelerating BERT Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12993/) (2020)
- [SentEval: An Evaluation Toolkit for Universal Sentence Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05449/) (2018)
- [BERT Loses Patience: Fast and Robust Inference with Early Exit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04152/) (2020)
- [FastBERT: a Self-distilling BERT with Adaptive Inference Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02178/) (2020)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)
- [BlockDrop: Dynamic Inference Paths in Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08393/) (2017)
- [Compressing BERT: Studying the Effects of Weight Pruning on Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08307/) (2020)
- [The Right Tool for the Job: Matching Model and Instance Complexities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07453/) (2020)
- [CascadeBERT: Accelerating Inference of Pre-trained Language Models via Calibrated Complete Models Cascade](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14682/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large-scale pre-trained language models such as BERT have contributed significantly to the development of NLP. However, those models require large computational resources, making it difficult to be applied to mobile devices where computing power is limited. In this paper we aim to address the weakness of existing input-adaptive inference methods which fail to take full advantage of the structure of BERT. We propose Dynamic Planning in BERT, a novel fine-tuning strategy that can accelerate the inference process of BERT through selecting a subsequence of transformer layers list of backbone as a computational path for an input sample. To do this, our approach adds a planning module to the original BERT model to determine whether a layer is included or bypassed during inference. Experimental results on the GLUE benchmark exhibit that our method reduces latency to 75% while maintaining 98% accuracy, yielding a better accuracy-speed trade-off compared to state-of-the-art input-adaptive methods.