Performance Control in Early Exiting to Deploy Large Models at the Same Cost of Smaller Ones

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mofakhami, Mehrnaz, Bayat, Reza, Mitliagkas, Ioannis, Monteiro, Joao, Zantedeschi, Valentina
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Mofakhami, Mehrnaz
Bayat, Reza
Mitliagkas, Ioannis
Monteiro, Joao
Zantedeschi, Valentina
author_facet Mofakhami, Mehrnaz
Bayat, Reza
Mitliagkas, Ioannis
Monteiro, Joao
Zantedeschi, Valentina
contents Early Exiting (EE) is a promising technique for speeding up inference by adaptively allocating compute resources to data points based on their difficulty. The approach enables predictions to exit at earlier layers for simpler samples while reserving more computation for challenging ones. In this study, we first present a novel perspective on the EE approach, showing that larger models deployed with EE can achieve higher performance than smaller models while maintaining similar computational costs. As existing EE approaches rely on confidence estimation at each exit point, we further study the impact of overconfidence on the controllability of the compute-performance trade-off. We introduce Performance Control Early Exiting (PCEE), a method that enables accuracy thresholding by basing decisions not on a data point's confidence but on the average accuracy of samples with similar confidence levels from a held-out validation set. In our experiments, we show that PCEE offers a simple yet computationally efficient approach that provides better control over performance than standard confidence-based approaches, and allows us to scale up model sizes to yield performance gain while reducing the computational cost.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_19325
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Performance Control in Early Exiting to Deploy Large Models at the Same Cost of Smaller Ones
Mofakhami, Mehrnaz
Bayat, Reza
Mitliagkas, Ioannis
Monteiro, Joao
Zantedeschi, Valentina
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Early Exiting (EE) is a promising technique for speeding up inference by adaptively allocating compute resources to data points based on their difficulty. The approach enables predictions to exit at earlier layers for simpler samples while reserving more computation for challenging ones. In this study, we first present a novel perspective on the EE approach, showing that larger models deployed with EE can achieve higher performance than smaller models while maintaining similar computational costs. As existing EE approaches rely on confidence estimation at each exit point, we further study the impact of overconfidence on the controllability of the compute-performance trade-off. We introduce Performance Control Early Exiting (PCEE), a method that enables accuracy thresholding by basing decisions not on a data point's confidence but on the average accuracy of samples with similar confidence levels from a held-out validation set. In our experiments, we show that PCEE offers a simple yet computationally efficient approach that provides better control over performance than standard confidence-based approaches, and allows us to scale up model sizes to yield performance gain while reducing the computational cost.
title Performance Control in Early Exiting to Deploy Large Models at the Same Cost of Smaller Ones
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19325