Compute-Efficient Medical Image Classification with Softmax-Free Transformers and Sequence Normalization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Khader, Firas, Nahhas, Omar S. M. El, Han, Tianyu, Müller-Franzes, Gustav, Nebelung, Sven, Kather, Jakob Nikolas, Truhn, Daniel
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Khader, Firas
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Han, Tianyu
Müller-Franzes, Gustav
Nebelung, Sven
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
Truhn, Daniel
author_facet Khader, Firas
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Han, Tianyu
Müller-Franzes, Gustav
Nebelung, Sven
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
Truhn, Daniel
contents The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity relative to the sequence length, which constrains its application to longer sequences. This is especially crucial in medical imaging where high-resolution images can reach gigapixel scale. Efforts to address this issue have predominantely focused on complex techniques, such as decomposing the softmax operation integral to the Transformer's architecture. This paper addresses this quadratic computational complexity of Transformer models and introduces a remarkably simple and effective method that circumvents this issue by eliminating the softmax function from the attention mechanism and adopting a sequence normalization technique for the key, query, and value tokens. Coupled with a reordering of matrix multiplications this approach reduces the memory- and compute complexity to a linear scale. We evaluate this approach across various medical imaging datasets comprising fundoscopic, dermascopic, radiologic and histologic imaging data. Our findings highlight that these models exhibit a comparable performance to traditional transformer models, while efficiently handling longer sequences.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01314
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Compute-Efficient Medical Image Classification with Softmax-Free Transformers and Sequence Normalization
Khader, Firas
Nahhas, Omar S. M. El
Han, Tianyu
Müller-Franzes, Gustav
Nebelung, Sven
Kather, Jakob Nikolas
Truhn, Daniel
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
The Transformer model has been pivotal in advancing fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and computer vision. However, a critical limitation of this model is its quadratic computational and memory complexity relative to the sequence length, which constrains its application to longer sequences. This is especially crucial in medical imaging where high-resolution images can reach gigapixel scale. Efforts to address this issue have predominantely focused on complex techniques, such as decomposing the softmax operation integral to the Transformer's architecture. This paper addresses this quadratic computational complexity of Transformer models and introduces a remarkably simple and effective method that circumvents this issue by eliminating the softmax function from the attention mechanism and adopting a sequence normalization technique for the key, query, and value tokens. Coupled with a reordering of matrix multiplications this approach reduces the memory- and compute complexity to a linear scale. We evaluate this approach across various medical imaging datasets comprising fundoscopic, dermascopic, radiologic and histologic imaging data. Our findings highlight that these models exhibit a comparable performance to traditional transformer models, while efficiently handling longer sequences.
title Compute-Efficient Medical Image Classification with Softmax-Free Transformers and Sequence Normalization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01314