Xu, K. et al. (2025). LPViT: Low-Power Semi-structured Pruning for Vision Transformers. In: Leonardis, A., Ricci, E., Roth, S., Russakovsky, O., Sattler, T., Varol, G. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2024. ECCV 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15129. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73209-6_16
Abstract:
Vision transformers (ViTs) have emerged as a promising alternative to convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for various image analysis tasks, offering comparable or superior performance. However, one significant drawback of ViTs is their resource-intensive nature, leading to increased memory footprint, computation complexity, and power consumption. To democratize this high-performance technology and make it more environmentally friendly, it is essential to compress ViT models, reducing their resource requirements while maintaining high performance. In this paper, we introduce a new block-structured pruning to address the resource-intensive issue for ViTs, offering a balanced trade-off between accuracy and hardware acceleration. Unlike unstructured pruning or channel-wise structured pruning, block pruning leverages the block-wise structure of linear layers, resulting in more efficient matrix multiplications. To optimize this pruning scheme, our paper proposes a novel hardware-aware learning objective that simultaneously maximizes speedup and minimizes power consumption during inference, tailored to the block sparsity structure. This objective eliminates the need for empirical look-up tables and focuses solely on reducing parametrized layer connections. Moreover, our paper provides a lightweight algorithm to achieve post-training pruning for ViTs, utilizing second-order Taylor approximation and empirical optimization to solve the proposed hardware-aware objective. Extensive experiments on ImageNet are conducted across various ViT architectures, including DeiT-B and DeiT-S, demonstrating competitive performance with other pruning methods and achieving a remarkable balance between accuracy preservation and power savings. Especially, we achieve up to 3.93x and 1.79x speedups on dedicated hardware and GPUs respectively for DeiT-B, and also observe an inference power reduction by 1.4x on real-world GPUs.
License type:
Publisher Copyright
Funding Info:
This research / project is supported by the A*STAR - MTC Programmatic Funds
Grant Reference no. : M23L7b0021
Description:
This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Computer Vision – ECCV 2024. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-73209-6_16.