{"id":587764,"date":"2019-05-15T09:59:06","date_gmt":"2019-05-15T16:59:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=587764"},"modified":"2019-05-15T10:00:27","modified_gmt":"2019-05-15T17:00:27","slug":"improving-multi-task-deep-neural-networks-via-knowledge-distillation-for-natural-language-understanding","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/improving-multi-task-deep-neural-networks-via-knowledge-distillation-for-natural-language-understanding\/","title":{"rendered":"Improving Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks via Knowledge Distillation for Natural Language Understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This paper explores the use of knowledge distillation to improve a Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) (Liu et al., 2019) for learning text representations across multiple natural language understanding tasks. Although ensemble learning can improve model performance, serving an ensemble of large DNNs such as MT-DNN can be prohibitively expensive. Here we apply the knowledge distillation method (Hinton et al., 2015) in the multi-task learning setting. For each task, we train an ensemble of different MT-DNNs (teacher) that outperforms any single model, and then train a single MT-DNN (student) via multi-task learning to \\emph{distill} knowledge from these ensemble teachers. We show that the distilled MT-DNN significantly outperforms the original MT-DNN on 7 out of 9 GLUE tasks, pushing the GLUE benchmark (single model) to 83.7\\% (1.5\\% absolute improvement\\footnote{ Based on the GLUE leaderboard at <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/gluebenchmark.com\/leaderboard\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a> as of April 1, 2019.}). The code and pre-trained models will be made publicly available at <a class=\"msr-external-link glyph-append glyph-append-open-in-new-tab glyph-append-xsmall\" href=\"https:\/\/github.com\/namisan\/mt-dnn\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<span class=\"sr-only\"> (opens in new tab)<\/span><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This paper explores the use of knowledge distillation to improve a Multi-Task Deep Neural Network (MT-DNN) (Liu et al., 2019) for learning text representations across multiple natural language understanding tasks. Although ensemble learning can improve model performance, serving an ensemble of large DNNs such as MT-DNN can be prohibitively expensive. Here we apply the knowledge [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr-author-ordering":null,"msr_publishername":"","msr_publisher_other":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_edition":"","msr_editors":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_issue":"","msr_journal":"","msr_number":"","msr_organization":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_page_range_start":"","msr_page_range_end":"","msr_series":"","msr_volume":"","msr_copyright":"","msr_conference_name":"","msr_doi":"","msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_mag_id":"","msr_pubmed_id":"","msr_other_authors":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_award":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_institution":"","msr_host":"","msr_version":"","msr_duration":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_s2_match_type":"","msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_published_date":"2019-4-20","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_notes":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_conference_url":"","msr_journal_url":"","msr_s2_pdf_url":"","msr_year":0,"msr_citation_count":0,"msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_s2_match_confidence":0,"msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":true,"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_pub_ids":[],"msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13545],"msr-publication-type":[193726],"msr-publisher":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-587764","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-human-language-technologies","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2019-4-20","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/1904.09482.pdf","id":"587767","title":"1904-09482","label_id":"243132","label":0},{"type":"url","viewUrl":"false","id":"false","title":"https:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/1904.09482","label_id":"243109","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_citation_count":0,"msr_citation_count_updated":"","msr_s2_paper_id":"","msr_influential_citations":0,"msr_reference_count":0,"msr_arxiv_id":"","msr_s2_author_ids":[],"msr_s2_open_access":false,"msr_s2_pdf_url":null,"msr_attachments":[{"id":587767,"url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/1904.09482.pdf"}],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Xiaodong Liu","user_id":34877,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Xiaodong Liu"},{"type":"text","value":"Pengcheng He","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Weizhu Chen","user_id":34863,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Weizhu Chen"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Jianfeng Gao","user_id":32246,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Jianfeng Gao"}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144736],"msr_project":[649749],"publication":[],"video":[],"msr-tool":[569964],"msr_publication_type":"unpublished","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":649749,"post_title":"AI at Scale","post_name":"ai-at-scale","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2020-05-19 08:01:11","post_modified":"2024-09-09 08:40:22","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/ai-at-scale\/","post_excerpt":"AI at Scale is an applied research initiative that works to evolve Microsoft products with the adoption of deep learning for both natural language text and image processing. Our work is actively being integrated into Microsoft products, including Bing, Office, and Xbox.","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/649749"}]}}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/587764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/587764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":587770,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/587764\/revisions\/587770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=587764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publisher","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publisher?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=587764"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=587764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}