deepspeedai / deepspeedai/DeepSpeed
ZeroQuant not compressing and making BERT slower
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Python
- Stars
- 43.1k
- Forks
- 5k
- Avg merge
- 4d 15h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 112
Description
Describe the bug
I was expecting a compressed & faster BERT model after running the BERT ZeroQuant example in DeepSpeedExamples. However, the clean model isn't any smaller (still 417.7 MB) or faster (in fact, it's slower) than the original.
To Reproduce
- Go to Google Colab and change to GPU runtime
- Run the following:
pip install deepspeed==0.7.0
git clone https://github.com/microsoft/DeepSpeedExamples
cd DeepSpeedExamples/model_compression/bert
(In the zero_quant.sh file, change master_port (e.g. to 9995) and task to sst2 & eval_batch_size to 32 (otherwise you'll get CUDA out of memory))
bash bash_script/ZeroQuant/zero_quant.sh
Expected behavior
I expected the final clean model to be a compressed version of the original one, thus being smaller & faster but it isn't.
ds_report output

System info (please complete the following information):
- OS: Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS
- 1 Tesla T4 GPU
- Tried with both 3.7.13 and 3.9
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start with DeepSpeedExamples/model_compression/bert/bash_script/ZeroQuant/zero_quant.sh and reproduce the command with the stated BERT, SST-2, batch-size, and GPU settings. Compare the original and final clean model sizes and inference speed, then trace the example's compression and evaluation steps. Done means identifying why compression is absent or slower and confirming the corrected behavior with the example.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- python
- Domain
- machine-learning, performance
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 4/5
- Estimated time
- 3-5 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100