# Early Transformers: A study on Efficient Training of Transformer Models through Early-Bird Lottery Tickets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.02353 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.02353/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 13 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [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)
- [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)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10650/) (2019)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis for Pre-trained BERT Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12223/) (2020)
- [Structured Pruning of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04732/) (2019)
- [Drawing Early-Bird Tickets: Towards More Efficient Training of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11957/) (2019)
- [EarlyBERT: Efficient BERT Training via Early-bird Lottery Tickets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00063/) (2020)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The training of Transformer models has revolutionized natural language processing and computer vision, but it remains a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. This paper investigates the applicability of the early-bird ticket hypothesis to optimize the training efficiency of Transformer models. We propose a methodology that combines iterative pruning, masked distance calculation, and selective retraining to identify early-bird tickets in various Transformer architectures, including ViT, Swin-T, GPT-2, and RoBERTa. Our experimental results demonstrate that early-bird tickets can be consistently found within the first few epochs of training or fine-tuning, enabling significant resource optimization without compromising performance. The pruned models obtained from early-bird tickets achieve comparable or even superior accuracy to their unpruned counterparts while substantially reducing memory usage. Furthermore, our comparative analysis highlights the generalizability of the early-bird ticket phenomenon across different Transformer models and tasks. This research contributes to the development of efficient training strategies for Transformer models, making them more accessible and resource-friendly. By leveraging early-bird tickets, practitioners can accelerate the progress of natural language processing and computer vision applications while reducing the computational burden associated with training Transformer models.