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What is: I-BERT?

SourceI-BERT: Integer-only BERT Quantization
Year2000
Data SourceCC BY-SA - https://paperswithcode.com

I-BERT is a quantized version of BERT 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, it performs an end-to-end integer-only BERT inference without any floating point calculation.

In particular, GELU and Softmax are approximated with lightweight second-order polynomials, which can be evaluated with integer-only arithmetic. For LayerNorm, integer-only computation is performed by leveraging a known algorithm for integer calculation of square root.