model, called DistilBERT, which can then be fine-tuned with good performances on a wide range of tasks like its larger
counterparts. While most prior work investigated the use of distillation for building task-specific models, we leverage
knowledge distillation during the pretraining phase and show that it is possible to reduce the size of a BERT model by
40%, while retaining 97% of its language understanding capabilities and being 60% faster. To leverage the inductive
biases learned by larger models during pretraining, we introduce a triple loss combining language modeling,
distillation and cosine-distance losses. Our smaller, faster and lighter model is cheaper to pre-train and we
demonstrate its capabilities for on-device computations in a proof-of-concept experiment and a comparative on-device
