Overview
The I-BERT model was proposed in I-BERT: Integer-only BERT Quantization by
Sehoon Kim, Amir Gholami, Zhewei Yao, Michael W. Mahoney and Kurt Keutzer. It's a quantized version of RoBERTa running
inference up to four times faster.
The abstract from the paper is the following:
Transformer based models, like BERT and RoBERTa, have achieved state-of-the-art results in many Natural Language
Processing tasks. However, their memory footprint, inference latency, and power consumption are prohibitive for
efficient inference at the edge, and even at the data center. While quantization can be a viable solution for this,
previous work on quantizing Transformer based models use floating-point arithmetic during inference, which cannot
efficiently utilize integer-only logical units such as the recent Turing Tensor Cores, or traditional integer-only ARM
