LowFormer: Hardware Efficient Design for Convolutional Transformer Backbones

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Nottebaum, Moritz, Dunnhofer, Matteo, Micheloni, Christian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Nottebaum, Moritz
Dunnhofer, Matteo
Micheloni, Christian
author_facet Nottebaum, Moritz
Dunnhofer, Matteo
Micheloni, Christian
contents Research in efficient vision backbones is evolving into models that are a mixture of convolutions and transformer blocks. A smart combination of both, architecture-wise and component-wise is mandatory to excel in the speedaccuracy trade-off. Most publications focus on maximizing accuracy and utilize MACs (multiply accumulate operations) as an efficiency metric. The latter however often do not measure accurately how fast a model actually is due to factors like memory access cost and degree of parallelism. We analyzed common modules and architectural design choices for backbones not in terms of MACs, but rather in actual throughput and latency, as the combination of the latter two is a better representation of the efficiency of models in real applications. We applied the conclusions taken from that analysis to create a recipe for increasing hardware-efficiency in macro design. Additionally we introduce a simple slimmed-down version of MultiHead Self-Attention, that aligns with our analysis. We combine both macro and micro design to create a new family of hardware-efficient backbone networks called LowFormer. LowFormer achieves a remarkable speedup in terms of throughput and latency, while achieving similar or better accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient backbones. In order to prove the generalizability of our hardware-efficient design, we evaluate our method on GPU, mobile GPU and ARM CPU. We further show that the downstream tasks object detection and semantic segmentation profit from our hardware-efficient architecture. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ altair199797/LowFormer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LowFormer: Hardware Efficient Design for Convolutional Transformer Backbones
Nottebaum, Moritz
Dunnhofer, Matteo
Micheloni, Christian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Research in efficient vision backbones is evolving into models that are a mixture of convolutions and transformer blocks. A smart combination of both, architecture-wise and component-wise is mandatory to excel in the speedaccuracy trade-off. Most publications focus on maximizing accuracy and utilize MACs (multiply accumulate operations) as an efficiency metric. The latter however often do not measure accurately how fast a model actually is due to factors like memory access cost and degree of parallelism. We analyzed common modules and architectural design choices for backbones not in terms of MACs, but rather in actual throughput and latency, as the combination of the latter two is a better representation of the efficiency of models in real applications. We applied the conclusions taken from that analysis to create a recipe for increasing hardware-efficiency in macro design. Additionally we introduce a simple slimmed-down version of MultiHead Self-Attention, that aligns with our analysis. We combine both macro and micro design to create a new family of hardware-efficient backbone networks called LowFormer. LowFormer achieves a remarkable speedup in terms of throughput and latency, while achieving similar or better accuracy than current state-of-the-art efficient backbones. In order to prove the generalizability of our hardware-efficient design, we evaluate our method on GPU, mobile GPU and ARM CPU. We further show that the downstream tasks object detection and semantic segmentation profit from our hardware-efficient architecture. Code and models are available at https://github.com/ altair199797/LowFormer.
title LowFormer: Hardware Efficient Design for Convolutional Transformer Backbones
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03460