Multi-criteria Token Fusion with One-step-ahead Attention for Efficient Vision Transformers
Authors: Sanghyeok Lee, Joonmyung Choi, Hyunwoo J. Kim

Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a prominent backbone for computer vision. For more efficient ViTs recent works lessen the quadratic cost of the self-attention layer by pruning or fusing the redundant tokens. However these works faced the speed-accuracy trade-off caused by the loss of information. Here we argue that token fusion needs to consider diverse relations between tokens to minimize information loss. In this paper we propose a Multi-criteria Token Fusion (MCTF) that gradually fuses the tokens based on multi-criteria (i.e. similarity informativeness and size of fused tokens). Further we utilize the one-step-ahead attention which is the improved approach to capture the informativeness of the tokens. By training the model equipped with MCTF using a token reduction consistency we achieve the best speed-accuracy trade-off in the image classification (ImageNet1K). Experimental results prove that MCTF consistently surpasses the previous reduction methods with and without training. Specifically DeiT-T and DeiT-S with MCTF reduce FLOPs by about 44% while improving the performance (+0.5% and +0.3%) over the base model respectively. We also demonstrate the applicability of MCTF in various Vision Transformers (e.g. T2T-ViT LV-ViT) achieving at least 31% speedup without performance degradation. Code is available at https://github.com/mlvlab/MCTF.