processors. In this work, we propose I-BERT, a novel quantization scheme for Transformer based models that quantizes
the entire inference with integer-only arithmetic. Based on lightweight integer-only approximation methods for
nonlinear operations, e.g., GELU, Softmax, and Layer Normalization, I-BERT performs an end-to-end integer-only BERT
inference without any floating point calculation. We evaluate our approach on GLUE downstream tasks using
RoBERTa-Base/Large. We show that for both cases, I-BERT achieves similar (and slightly higher) accuracy as compared to
the full-precision baseline. Furthermore, our preliminary implementation of I-BERT shows a speedup of 2.4 - 4.0x for
INT8 inference on a T4 GPU system as compared to FP32 inference. The framework has been developed in PyTorch and has
