Comparative analysis of model compression techniques for achieving carbon efficient AI
摘要
The growing computational demands of models, such as BERT, have raised concerns about their environmental impact. This study addresses the pressing need for sustainable Artificial Intelligence practices by investigating the efficiency of model compression techniques in reducing the energy consumption and carbon emissions of transformer-based models without compromising performance. Specifically, we applied pruning, knowledge distillation, and quantization to transformer-based models (BERT, DistilBERT, ALBERT, and ELECTRA) using the Amazon Polarity Dataset for sentiment analysis. We also compared the energy efficiency of these compressed models against inherently carbon-efficient transformer models, such as TinyBERT and MobileBERT. To evaluate each model’s energy consumption and carbon emissions, we utilized the open-source tool CodeCarbon. Our findings indicate that applying model compression techniques resulted in a reduction in energy consumption of 32.097% for BERT with pruning and distillation,