Dropping layers in Transformer models (PyTorch / HuggingFace)
I came across this interesting paper on layers dropping in Transformer models and I am actually trying to implement it. However, I am wondering what would be a good practice to perform &quot;layer dropping&quot;.
I have have a couple of ideas but have no idea what would be the cleanest/safest way to go here:

masking the unwanted layers (some sort of pruning)
copying the wanted layers into a new model

If anyone has already done this before or has suggestion I'm all ears!
Cheers

I think one of the safest ways would be simply to skip the given layers in the forward pass.
For example, suppose you are using BERT and that you added the following entry to the config:
config.active_layers = [False, True] * 6  # using a 12 layers model

Then you could modify the BertEncoder class like the following:
class BertEncoder(nn.Module):
    def __init__(self, config):
        super().__init__()
        self.config = config
        self.layer = nn.ModuleList([BertLayer(config) for _ in range(config.num_hidden_layers)])
        self.gradient_checkpointing = False

    def forward(
        self,
        hidden_states,
        attention_mask=None,
        head_mask=None,
        encoder_hidden_states=None,
        encoder_attention_mask=None,
        past_key_values=None,
        use_cache=None,
        output_attentions=False,
        output_hidden_states=False,
        return_dict=True,
    ):
        all_hidden_states = () if output_hidden_states else None
        all_self_attentions = () if output_attentions else None
        all_cross_attentions = () if output_attentions and self.config.add_cross_attention else None

        next_decoder_cache = () if use_cache else None
        for i, layer_module in enumerate(self.layer):
            
            ########### MAGIC HERE #############
            if not self.config.active_layers[i]:
                continue
            
            if output_hidden_states:
                all_hidden_states = all_hidden_states + (hidden_states,)

            layer_head_mask = head_mask[i] if head_mask is not None else None
            past_key_value = past_key_values[i] if past_key_values is not None else None

            if self.gradient_checkpointing and self.training:

                if use_cache:
                    logger.warning(
                        &quot;`use_cache=True` is incompatible with gradient checkpointing. Setting `use_cache=False`...&quot;
                    )
                    use_cache = False

                def create_custom_forward(module):
                    def custom_forward(*inputs):
                        return module(*inputs, past_key_value, output_attentions)

                    return custom_forward

                layer_outputs = torch.utils.checkpoint.checkpoint(
                    create_custom_forward(layer_module),
                    hidden_states,
                    attention_mask,
                    layer_head_mask,
                    encoder_hidden_states,
                    encoder_attention_mask,
                )
            else:
                layer_outputs = layer_module(
                    hidden_states,
                    attention_mask,
                    layer_head_mask,
                    encoder_hidden_states,
                    encoder_attention_mask,
                    past_key_value,
                    output_attentions,
                )

            hidden_states = layer_outputs[0]
            if use_cache:
                next_decoder_cache += (layer_outputs[-1],)
            if output_attentions:
                all_self_attentions = all_self_attentions + (layer_outputs[1],)
                if self.config.add_cross_attention:
                    all_cross_attentions = all_cross_attentions + (layer_outputs[2],)

        if output_hidden_states:
            all_hidden_states = all_hidden_states + (hidden_states,)

        if not return_dict:
            return tuple(
                v
                for v in [
                    hidden_states,
                    next_decoder_cache,
                    all_hidden_states,
                    all_self_attentions,
                    all_cross_attentions,
                ]
                if v is not None
            )
        return BaseModelOutputWithPastAndCrossAttentions(
            last_hidden_state=hidden_states,
            past_key_values=next_decoder_cache,
            hidden_states=all_hidden_states,
            attentions=all_self_attentions,
            cross_attentions=all_cross_attentions,
        )

At the moment you may need to write your special BERT class using the new Encoder layer. However, you should be able to load the weights from the pre-trained models provided by huggingface.
BertEncoder code taken from here
