In plain words: During training, a vision model randomly skips some image tiles it processes, cutting work and memory without changing its design. On natural images it saved at least half the computation and memory; on high-resolution medical scans it cut both five times and improved accuracy.
Abstract · PatchDropout: Economizing Vision Transformers Using Patch Dropout
Vision transformers have demonstrated the potential to outperform CNNs in a variety of vision tasks. But the computational and memory requirements of these models prohibit their use in many applications, especially those that depend on high-resolution images, such as medical image classification. Efforts to train ViTs more efficiently are overly complicated, necessitating architectural changes or intricate training schemes. In this work, we show that standard ViT models can be efficiently trained at high resolution by randomly dropping input image patches. This simple approach, PatchDropout, reduces FLOPs and memory by at least 50% in standard natural image datasets such as ImageNet, and those savings only increase with image size. On CSAW, a high-resolution medical dataset, we observe a 5 times savings in computation and memory using PatchDropout, along with a boost in performance. For practitioners with a fixed computational or memory budget, PatchDropout makes it possible to choose image resolution, hyperparameters, or model size to get the most performance out of their model.
Yue Liu, Christos Matsoukas, Fredrik Strand, Hossein Azizpour, Kevin Smith
arXiv:2208.07220 · cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted Aug 10, 2022 · updated Oct 4, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV)