BERT-mini model finetuned with M-FAC

This model is finetuned on SQuAD version 2 dataset with state-of-the-art second-order optimizer M-FAC. Check NeurIPS 2021 paper for more details on M-FAC: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.03356.pdf.

Finetuning setup

For fair comparison against default Adam baseline, we finetune the model in the same framework as described here https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/tree/master/examples/pytorch/question-answering and just swap Adam optimizer with M-FAC. Hyperparameters used by M-FAC optimizer:

learning rate = 1e-4
number of gradients = 1024
dampening = 1e-6

Results

We share the best model out of 5 runs with the following score on SQuAD version 2 validation set:

exact_match = 58.38
f1 = 61.65

Mean and standard deviation for 5 runs on SQuAD version 2 validation set:

	Exact Match	F1
Adam	54.80 ± 0.47	58.13 ± 0.31
M-FAC	58.02 ± 0.39	61.35 ± 0.24

Results can be reproduced by adding M-FAC optimizer code in https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/examples/pytorch/question-answering/run_qa.py and running the following bash script:

CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0 python run_qa.py \
    --seed 8276 \
    --model_name_or_path prajjwal1/bert-mini \
    --dataset_name squad_v2 \
    --version_2_with_negative \
    --do_train \
    --do_eval \
    --per_device_train_batch_size 12 \
    --learning_rate 1e-4 \
    --num_train_epochs 2 \
    --max_seq_length 384 \
    --doc_stride 128 \
    --output_dir out_dir/ \
    --optim MFAC \
    --optim_args '{"lr": 1e-4, "num_grads": 1024, "damp": 1e-6}'

We believe these results could be improved with modest tuning of hyperparameters: per_device_train_batch_size, learning_rate, num_train_epochs, num_grads and damp. For the sake of fair comparison and a robust default setup we use the same hyperparameters across all models (bert-tiny, bert-mini) and all datasets (SQuAD version 2 and GLUE).

Our code for M-FAC can be found here: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/M-FAC. A step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate and use M-FAC with any repository can be found here: https://github.com/IST-DASLab/M-FAC/tree/master/tutorials.

BibTeX entry and citation info

@article{frantar2021m,
  title={M-FAC: Efficient Matrix-Free Approximations of Second-Order Information},
  author={Frantar, Elias and Kurtic, Eldar and Alistarh, Dan},
  journal={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
  volume={35},
  year={2021}
}