SLAB: Efficient Transformers with Simplified Linear Attention and
  Progressive Re-parameterized Batch Normalization
Authors: name: Jialong Guo; name: Xinghao Chen; name: Yehui Tang; name: Yunhe Wang
Published: 2024-05-19 15:22:25

Abstract: Transformers have become foundational architectures for both natural language
and computer vision tasks. However, the high computational cost makes it quite
challenging to deploy on resource-constraint devices. This paper investigates
the computational bottleneck modules of efficient transformer, i.e.,
normalization layers and attention modules. LayerNorm is commonly used in
transformer architectures but is not computational friendly due to statistic
calculation during inference. However, replacing LayerNorm with more efficient
BatchNorm in transformer often leads to inferior performance and collapse in
training. To address this problem, we propose a novel method named PRepBN to
progressively replace LayerNorm with re-parameterized BatchNorm in training.
Moreover, we propose a simplified linear attention (SLA) module that is simple
yet effective to achieve strong performance. Extensive experiments on image
classification as well as object detection demonstrate the effectiveness of our
proposed method. For example, our SLAB-Swin obtains 83.6% top-1 accuracy on
ImageNet-1K with 16.2ms latency, which is 2.4ms less than that of
Flatten-Swin with 0.1% higher accuracy. We also evaluated our method for
language modeling task and obtain comparable performance and lower
latency.Codes are publicly available at https://github.com/xinghaochen/SLAB and
https://github.com/mindspore-lab/models/tree/master/research/huawei-noah/SLAB.