NuWa: Deriving Lightweight Task-Specific Vision Transformers for Edge Devices

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wei, Ziteng, He, Qiang, Li, Bing, Chen, Feifei, Yang, Yun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wei, Ziteng
He, Qiang
Li, Bing
Chen, Feifei
Yang, Yun
author_facet Wei, Ziteng
He, Qiang
Li, Bing
Chen, Feifei
Yang, Yun
contents Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in computer vision tasks but lack flexibility for edge devices' diverse needs. A vital issue is that ViTs pre-trained to cover a broad range of tasks are \textit{over-qualified} for edge devices that usually demand only part of a ViT's knowledge for specific tasks. Their task-specific accuracy on these edge devices is suboptimal. We discovered that small ViTs that focus on device-specific tasks can improve model accuracy and in the meantime, accelerate model inference. This paper presents NuWa, an approach that derives small ViTs from the base ViT for edge devices with specific task requirements. NuWa can transfer task-specific knowledge extracted from the base ViT into small ViTs that fully leverage constrained resources on edge devices to maximize model accuracy with inference latency assurance. Experiments with three base ViTs on three public datasets demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art solutions, NuWa improves model accuracy by up to $\text{11.83}\%$ and accelerates model inference by 1.29$\times$ - 2.79$\times$. Code for reproduction is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Task_Specific-3A5E.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_03118
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle NuWa: Deriving Lightweight Task-Specific Vision Transformers for Edge Devices
Wei, Ziteng
He, Qiang
Li, Bing
Chen, Feifei
Yang, Yun
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Vision Transformers (ViTs) excel in computer vision tasks but lack flexibility for edge devices' diverse needs. A vital issue is that ViTs pre-trained to cover a broad range of tasks are \textit{over-qualified} for edge devices that usually demand only part of a ViT's knowledge for specific tasks. Their task-specific accuracy on these edge devices is suboptimal. We discovered that small ViTs that focus on device-specific tasks can improve model accuracy and in the meantime, accelerate model inference. This paper presents NuWa, an approach that derives small ViTs from the base ViT for edge devices with specific task requirements. NuWa can transfer task-specific knowledge extracted from the base ViT into small ViTs that fully leverage constrained resources on edge devices to maximize model accuracy with inference latency assurance. Experiments with three base ViTs on three public datasets demonstrate that compared with state-of-the-art solutions, NuWa improves model accuracy by up to $\text{11.83}\%$ and accelerates model inference by 1.29$\times$ - 2.79$\times$. Code for reproduction is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Task_Specific-3A5E.
title NuWa: Deriving Lightweight Task-Specific Vision Transformers for Edge Devices
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.03118