Vision transformers are known to be more computationally and data-intensive than CNN models. These transformer models such as ViT, require all the input image tokens to learn the relationship among them. However, many of these tokens are not informative and may contain irrelevant information such as unrelated background or unimportant scenery. These tokens are overlooked by the multi-head self-attention (MHSA), resulting in many redundant and unnecessary computations in MHSA and the feed-forward network (FFN). In this work, we propose a method to optimize the amount of unnecessary interactions between unimportant tokens by separating and sending them through a different low-cost computational path. Our method does not add any parameters to the ViT model and aims to find the best trade-off between training throughput and achieving a 0% loss in the Top-1 accuracy of the final model. Our experimental results on training ViT-small from scratch show that SkipViT is capable of effectively dropping 55% of the tokens while gaining more than 13% training throughput and maintaining classification accuracy at the level of the baseline model on Huawei Ascend910A.

我们的研究提出了一种方法来优化视觉转换器模型中不相关令牌之间的不必要交互数量，通过将它们分离并通过不同的低成本计算路径发送，同时在训练吞吐量上获得13%以上的提升，并在华为Ascend910A上维持与基准模型相同级别的分类准确性。

SkipViT：使用令牌级别的跳跃连接加速视觉变换