In plain words: Instead of throwing away image patches a vision model finds redundant, this method gradually fuses similar patches into one as the model runs, with no retraining needed. It roughly doubled processing speed on large image and video models while losing only 0.2–0.3% accuracy.
Abstract · Token Merging: Your ViT But Faster
We introduce Token Merging (ToMe), a simple method to increase the throughput of existing ViT models without needing to train. ToMe gradually combines similar tokens in a transformer using a general and light-weight matching algorithm that is as fast as pruning while being more accurate. Off-the-shelf, ToMe can 2x the throughput of state-of-the-art ViT-L @ 512 and ViT-H @ 518 models on images and 2.2x the throughput of ViT-L on video with only a 0.2-0.3% accuracy drop in each case. ToMe can also easily be applied during training, improving in practice training speed up to 2x for MAE fine-tuning on video. Training with ToMe further minimizes accuracy drop, leading to 2x the throughput of ViT-B on audio for only a 0.4% mAP drop. Qualitatively, we find that ToMe merges object parts into one token, even over multiple frames of video. Overall, ToMe's accuracy and speed are competitive with state-of-the-art on images, video, and audio.
Daniel Bolya, Cheng-Yang Fu, Xiaoliang Dai, Peizhao Zhang, Christoph Feichtenhofer, Judy Hoffman
arXiv:2210.09461 · cs.CV · submitted Oct 17, 2022 · updated Mar 1, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted ICLR 2023 Oral (top 5%) [final v2]. This version includes stable diffusion experiments. See code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/ToMe