Comparative analysis of model compression techniques for achieving carbon efficient AI

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, [Formula: see text]% for DistilBERT with pruning, 7.12% for ALBERT with quantization, and 23.934% for ELECTRA with pruning and distillation, while maintaining performance metrics within a range of 95.871-99.062% accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, and ROC AUC except for ALBERT with quantization. Specifically, BERT with pruning and distillation achieved 95.90% accuracy, 95.90% precision, 95.90% recall, 95.90% F1-score, and 98.87% ROC AUC; DistilBERT with pruning achieved 95.87% accuracy, 95.87% precision, 95.87% recall, 95.87% F1-score, and 99.06% ROC AUC; ELECTRA with pruning and distillation achieved 95.92% accuracy, 95.92% precision, 95.92% recall, 95.92% F1-score, and 99.30% ROC AUC; and ALBERT with quantization achieved 65.44% accuracy, 67.82% precision, 65.44% recall, 63.46% F1-score, and 72.31% ROC AUC, indicating significant performance degradation due to quantization sensitivity in its already compressed architecture. Overall, this demonstrates the potential for sustainable Artificial Intelligence practices using model compression.