BERTology

There is a growing field of study concerned with investigating the inner working of large-scale transformers like BERT (that some call “BERTology”). Some good examples of this field are:

• BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline by Ian Tenney, Dipanjan Das, Ellie Pavlick: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05950
• Are Sixteen Heads Really Better than One? by Paul Michel, Omer Levy, Graham Neubig: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10650
• What Does BERT Look At? An Analysis of BERT’s Attention by Kevin Clark, Urvashi Khandelwal, Omer Levy, Christopher D. Manning: https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04341
• CAT-probing: A Metric-based Approach to Interpret How Pre-trained Models for Programming Language Attend Code Structure: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.04633

In order to help this new field develop, we have included a few additional features in the BERT/GPT/GPT-2 models to help people access the inner representations, mainly adapted from the great work of Paul Michel (https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10650):

• accessing all the hidden-states of BERT/GPT/GPT-2,
• accessing all the attention weights for each head of BERT/GPT/GPT-2,
• retrieving heads output values and gradients to be able to compute head importance score and prune head as explained in https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.10650.

To help you understand and use these features, we have added a specific example script: bertology.py which extracts information and prune a model pre-trained on GLUE.

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