Multi-Tailed Vision Transformer for Efficient Inference

TL;DR

This paper introduces MT-ViT, a multi-tailed vision transformer that adaptively selects the optimal sequence length for efficient inference, significantly reducing FLOPs without accuracy loss.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel multi-tailed architecture with a tail predictor, enabling dynamic token sequence length selection for improved efficiency in Vision Transformers.

Findings

Reduces FLOPs significantly without accuracy loss.

Outperforms existing methods in efficiency and accuracy.

Demonstrates effectiveness on ImageNet-1K.

Abstract

Recently, Vision Transformer (ViT) has achieved promising performance in image recognition and gradually serves as a powerful backbone in various vision tasks. To satisfy the sequential input of Transformer, the tail of ViT first splits each image into a sequence of visual tokens with a fixed length. Then the following self-attention layers constructs the global relationship between tokens to produce useful representation for the downstream tasks. Empirically, representing the image with more tokens leads to better performance, yet the quadratic computational complexity of self-attention layer to the number of tokens could seriously influence the efficiency of ViT's inference. For computational reduction, a few pruning methods progressively prune uninformative tokens in the Transformer encoder, while leaving the number of tokens before the Transformer untouched. In fact, fewer tokens as the input for the Transformer encoder can directly reduce the following computational cost. In this spirit, we propose a Multi-Tailed Vision Transformer (MT-ViT) in the paper. MT-ViT adopts multiple tails to produce visual sequences of different lengths for the following Transformer encoder. A tail predictor is introduced to decide which tail is the most efficient for the image to produce accurate prediction. Both modules are optimized in an end-to-end fashion, with the Gumbel-Softmax trick. Experiments on ImageNet-1K demonstrate that MT-ViT can achieve a significant reduction on FLOPs with no degradation of the accuracy and outperform other compared methods in both accuracy and FLOPs.