Mulcode: A multiplicative multi-way model for compressing neural language model

Abstract

It is challenging to deploy deep neural nets on memory-constrained devices due to the explosion of numbers of parameters. Especially, the input embedding layer and Softmax layer usually dominate the memory usage in an RNNbased language model. For example, input embedding and Softmax matrices in IWSLT-2014 German-to-English data set account for more than 80% of the total model parameters. To compress these embedding layers, we propose MulCode, a novel multi-way multiplicative neural compressor. MulCode learns an adaptively created matrix and its multiplicative compositions. Together with a prior weighted loss, MulCode is more effective than the state-of-the-art compression methods. On the IWSLT-2014 machine translation data set, MulCode achieved 17 times compression rate for the embedding and Softmax matrices, and when combined with quantization technique, our method can achieve 41.38 times compression rate with very little loss in performance.