A General and Efficient Training for Transformer via Token Expansion

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Wenxuan, Shen, Yunhang, Xie, Jiao, Zhang, Baochang, He, Gaoqi, Li, Ke, Sun, Xing, Lin, Shaohui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Huang, Wenxuan
Shen, Yunhang
Xie, Jiao
Zhang, Baochang
He, Gaoqi
Li, Ke
Sun, Xing
Lin, Shaohui
author_facet Huang, Wenxuan
Shen, Yunhang
Xie, Jiao
Zhang, Baochang
He, Gaoqi
Li, Ke
Sun, Xing
Lin, Shaohui
contents The remarkable performance of Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically requires an extremely large training cost. Existing methods have attempted to accelerate the training of ViTs, yet typically disregard method universality with accuracy dropping. Meanwhile, they break the training consistency of the original transformers, including the consistency of hyper-parameters, architecture, and strategy, which prevents them from being widely applied to different Transformer networks. In this paper, we propose a novel token growth scheme Token Expansion (termed ToE) to achieve consistent training acceleration for ViTs. We introduce an "initialization-expansion-merging" pipeline to maintain the integrity of the intermediate feature distribution of original transformers, preventing the loss of crucial learnable information in the training process. ToE can not only be seamlessly integrated into the training and fine-tuning process of transformers (e.g., DeiT and LV-ViT), but also effective for efficient training frameworks (e.g., EfficientTrain), without twisting the original training hyper-parameters, architecture, and introducing additional training strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ToE achieves about 1.3x faster for the training of ViTs in a lossless manner, or even with performance gains over the full-token training baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Osilly/TokenExpansion .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_00672
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A General and Efficient Training for Transformer via Token Expansion
Huang, Wenxuan
Shen, Yunhang
Xie, Jiao
Zhang, Baochang
He, Gaoqi
Li, Ke
Sun, Xing
Lin, Shaohui
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
The remarkable performance of Vision Transformers (ViTs) typically requires an extremely large training cost. Existing methods have attempted to accelerate the training of ViTs, yet typically disregard method universality with accuracy dropping. Meanwhile, they break the training consistency of the original transformers, including the consistency of hyper-parameters, architecture, and strategy, which prevents them from being widely applied to different Transformer networks. In this paper, we propose a novel token growth scheme Token Expansion (termed ToE) to achieve consistent training acceleration for ViTs. We introduce an "initialization-expansion-merging" pipeline to maintain the integrity of the intermediate feature distribution of original transformers, preventing the loss of crucial learnable information in the training process. ToE can not only be seamlessly integrated into the training and fine-tuning process of transformers (e.g., DeiT and LV-ViT), but also effective for efficient training frameworks (e.g., EfficientTrain), without twisting the original training hyper-parameters, architecture, and introducing additional training strategies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ToE achieves about 1.3x faster for the training of ViTs in a lossless manner, or even with performance gains over the full-token training baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/Osilly/TokenExpansion .
title A General and Efficient Training for Transformer via Token Expansion
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00672