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The paper proposes a small post-hoc adapter that aligns the token embeddings of a compressed transformer with those of a stronger reference model, aiming to recover accuracy lost to compression without retraining the original teacher pipeline. Results are reported on POS tagging, NER, and extractive QA using BERT-base as the reference and four compressed BERT variants, with the largest gains on the smallest models. The evidence is limited to one model family and three token-level tasks, so readers deploying compressed models should check whether the gains hold on their own workloads and what the adapter's extra inference cost is.
Improving the Performance of Compressed Transformers with Post-Hoc Embedding Alignment
arXiv:2602.14635v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Model compression is necessary for deployment of transformer models in resource-constrained environments. However, compression reduces the performance of transformer models on downstream tasks. Existing solutions such as Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) have their own limitations. KD trains the student under the teacher's supervision, but needs the teacher's training pipeline. PEFT methods such as LoRA adapt a model to a new task, but they do not recover the loss caused by compression. Our intuition is that a compressed model can be improved by aligning its token embeddings with those of a better performing reference model. We learn this alignment with a small feed-forward Alignment Adapter (AlAd) placed after the final layer of the compressed model. AlAd reads a window of neighbouring tokens, so it can use local context. AlAd is trained post-hoc, after the compressed model has been produced. The compressed model can either be kept frozen or jointly fine-tuned with AlAd. We study the effect of AlAd with BERT-base as the reference model and four compressed variants of the BERT family. We evaluate AlAd on three token-level tasks: POS tagging, NER and Extractive Question Answering. AlAd improves performance of compressed models on all three tasks. Joint fine-tuning gives a larger improvement in performance. The performance gain is the largest for the smallest models. AlAd provides a favorable trade-off between the efficiency and the performance of compressed models.
Abstract:Model compression is necessary for deployment of transformer models in resource-constrained environments. However, compression reduces the performance of transformer models on downstream tasks. Existing solutions such as Knowledge Distillation (KD) and Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) have their own limitations. KD trains the student under the teacher's supervision, but needs the teacher's training pipeline. PEFT methods such as LoRA adapt a model to a new task, but they do not recover the loss caused by compression. Our intuition is that a compressed model can be improved by aligning its token embeddings with those of a better performing reference model. We learn this alignment with a small feed-forward Alignment Adapter (AlAd) placed after the final layer of the compressed model. AlAd reads a window of neighbouring tokens, so it can use local context. AlAd is trained post-hoc, after the compressed model has been produced. The compressed model can either be kept frozen or jointly fine-tuned with AlAd. We study the effect of AlAd with BERT-base as the reference model and four compressed variants of the BERT family. We evaluate AlAd on three token-level tasks: POS tagging, NER and Extractive Question Answering. AlAd improves performance of compressed models on all three tasks. Joint fine-tuning gives a larger improvement in performance. The performance gain is the largest for the smallest models. AlAd provides a favorable trade-off between the efficiency and the performance of compressed models.
Machine Learning (cs.LG); Computation and Language (cs.CL); Information Retrieval (cs.IR)
arXiv:2602.14635 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2602.14635v2 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.14635 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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