Deep Fusion: Efficient Network Training via Pre-trained Initializations

In recent years, deep learning has made remarkable progress in a wide range of domains, with a particularly notable impact on natural language processing tasks. One of the challenges associated with training deep neural networks is the need for large amounts of computational resources and time. In this paper, we present Deep Fusion, an efficient approach to network training that leverages pretrained initializations of smaller networks. We show that Deep Fusion accelerates the training process, reduces computational requirements, and leads to improved generalization performance on a variety of NLP tasks and T5 model sizes. Our experiments demonstrate that Deep Fusion is a practical and effective approach to reduce the training time and resource consumption while maintaining, or even surpassing, the performance of traditional training methods.