Increased training parameters have enabled large pre-trained models to excel in various downstream tasks. Nevertheless, the extensive computational requirements associated with these models hinder their widespread adoption within the community. We focus on Knowledge Distillation (KD), where a compact student model is trained to mimic a larger teacher model, facilitating the transfer of knowledge of large models. In contrast to much of the previous work, we scale up the parameters of the student model during training, to benefit from over-parameterization without increasing the inference latency. In particular, we propose a tensor decomposition strategy that effectively over-parameterizes the relatively small student model through an efficient and nearly lossless decomposition of its parameter matrices into higher-dimensional tensors. To ensure efficiency, we further introduce a tensor constraint loss to align the high-dimensional tensors between the student and teacher models. Comprehensive experiments validate the significant performance enhancement by our approach in various KD tasks, covering computer vision and natural language processing areas. Our code is available at https://github.com/intell-sci-comput/OPDF.

Recently, Mixture-of-Experts (short as MoE) architecture has achieved remarkable success in increasing the model capacity of large-scale language models. However, MoE requires incorporating significantly more parameters than the base model being extended. In this paper, we propose building a parameter-efficient MoE architecture by sharing information across experts. We adopt matrix product operator (MPO, a tensor decomposition from quantum many-body physics) to reconstruct the parameter matrix in the expert layer and increase model capacity for pre-trained language models by sharing parameters of the central tensor (containing the core information) among different experts while enabling the specificity through the auxiliary tensors (complementing the central tensor) of different experts. To address the unbalanced optimization issue, we further design the gradient mask strategy for the MPO-based MoE architecture. Extensive experiments based on T5 and GPT-2 show improved performance and efficiency of the pre-trained language model (27.2x reduction in total parameters for the superior model performance, compared with the Switch Transformers). Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/MPO/MPOE.

Peiyu Liu, Ze-Feng Gao, Wayne Xin Zhao, Zhi-Yuan Xie, Zhong-Yi Lu, Ji-Rong Wen. Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2021.

The deep neural network (DNN) based speech enhancement approaches have achieved promising performance. However, the number of parameters involved in these methods is usually enormous for the real applications of speech enhancement on the device with the limited resources. This seriously restricts the applications. To deal with this issue, model compression techniques are being widely studied. In this paper, we propose a model compression method based on matrix product operators (MPO) to substantially reduce the number of parameters in DNN models for speech enhancement. In this method, the weight matrices in the linear transformations of neural network model are replaced by the MPO decomposition format before training. In experiment, this process is applied to the causal neural network models, such as the feedforward multilayer perceptron (MLP) and long short-term memory (LSTM) models. Both MLP and LSTM models with/without compression are then utilized to estimate the ideal ratio mask for monaural speech enhancement. The experimental results show that our proposed MPO-based method outperforms the widely-used pruning method for speech enhancement under various compression rates, and further improvement can be achieved with respect to low compression rates. Our proposal provides an effective model compression method for speech enhancement, especially in cloud-free application.