论文标题
有效视觉变压器和卷积神经网络的动态空间稀疏
Dynamic Spatial Sparsification for Efficient Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks
论文作者
论文摘要
在本文中，我们通过在视觉数据中利用空间稀疏性提出了一种新的模型加速方法。我们观察到，视觉变压器中的最终预测仅基于最有用的令牌的子集，这足以准确识别图像识别。基于此观察，我们提出了一个动态令牌稀疏框架，以根据加速视觉变压器的输入逐渐和动态地修剪冗余令牌。具体而言，我们设计了一个轻量级预测模块，以估计给定当前功能的每个令牌的重要性得分。将模块添加到不同的层中以层次修剪冗余令牌。尽管该框架的启发是我们观察到视觉变压器中稀疏关注的启发，但我们发现自适应和不对称计算的想法可能是加速各种体系结构的一般解决方案。我们将我们的方法扩展到包括CNN和分层视觉变压器在内的层次模型，以及更复杂的密集预测任务，这些任务需要通过制定更通用的动态空间稀疏框架，并具有渐进性的稀疏性和非对称性计算，用于不同空间位置。通过将轻量级快速路径应用于信息较少的特征，并使用更具表现力的慢速路径到更重要的位置，我们可以维护特征地图的结构，同时大大降低整体计算。广泛的实验证明了我们框架对各种现代体系结构和不同视觉识别任务的有效性。我们的结果清楚地表明，动态空间稀疏为模型加速提供了一个新的，更有效的维度。代码可从https://github.com/raoyongming/dynamicvit获得
In this paper, we present a new approach for model acceleration by exploiting spatial sparsity in visual data. We observe that the final prediction in vision Transformers is only based on a subset of the most informative tokens, which is sufficient for accurate image recognition. Based on this observation, we propose a dynamic token sparsification framework to prune redundant tokens progressively and dynamically based on the input to accelerate vision Transformers. Specifically, we devise a lightweight prediction module to estimate the importance score of each token given the current features. The module is added to different layers to prune redundant tokens hierarchically. While the framework is inspired by our observation of the sparse attention in vision Transformers, we find the idea of adaptive and asymmetric computation can be a general solution for accelerating various architectures. We extend our method to hierarchical models including CNNs and hierarchical vision Transformers as well as more complex dense prediction tasks that require structured feature maps by formulating a more generic dynamic spatial sparsification framework with progressive sparsification and asymmetric computation for different spatial locations. By applying lightweight fast paths to less informative features and using more expressive slow paths to more important locations, we can maintain the structure of feature maps while significantly reducing the overall computations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework on various modern architectures and different visual recognition tasks. Our results clearly demonstrate that dynamic spatial sparsification offers a new and more effective dimension for model acceleration. Code is available at https://github.com/raoyongming/DynamicViT
