RePaViT: Scalable Vision Transformer Acceleration via Structural Reparameterization on Feedforward Network Layers

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Xu, Xuwei, Li, Yang, Chen, Yudong, Liu, Jiajun, Wang, Sen
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Xu, Xuwei
Li, Yang
Chen, Yudong
Liu, Jiajun
Wang, Sen
author_facet Xu, Xuwei
Li, Yang
Chen, Yudong
Liu, Jiajun
Wang, Sen
contents We reveal that feedforward network (FFN) layers, rather than attention layers, are the primary contributors to Vision Transformer (ViT) inference latency, with their impact signifying as model size increases. This finding highlights a critical opportunity for optimizing the efficiency of large-scale ViTs by focusing on FFN layers. In this work, we propose a novel channel idle mechanism that facilitates post-training structural reparameterization for efficient FFN layers during testing. Specifically, a set of feature channels remains idle and bypasses the nonlinear activation function in each FFN layer, thereby forming a linear pathway that enables structural reparameterization during inference. This mechanism results in a family of ReParameterizable Vision Transformers (RePaViTs), which achieve remarkable latency reductions with acceptable sacrifices (sometimes gains) in accuracy across various ViTs. The benefits of our method scale consistently with model sizes, demonstrating greater speed improvements and progressively narrowing accuracy gaps or even higher accuracies on larger models. In particular, RePa-ViT-Large and RePa-ViT-Huge enjoy 66.8% and 68.7% speed-ups with +1.7% and +1.1% higher top-1 accuracies under the same training strategy, respectively. RePaViT is the first to employ structural reparameterization on FFN layers to expedite ViTs to our best knowledge, and we believe that it represents an auspicious direction for efficient ViTs. Source code is available at https://github.com/Ackesnal/RePaViT.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21847
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RePaViT: Scalable Vision Transformer Acceleration via Structural Reparameterization on Feedforward Network Layers
Xu, Xuwei
Li, Yang
Chen, Yudong
Liu, Jiajun
Wang, Sen
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
We reveal that feedforward network (FFN) layers, rather than attention layers, are the primary contributors to Vision Transformer (ViT) inference latency, with their impact signifying as model size increases. This finding highlights a critical opportunity for optimizing the efficiency of large-scale ViTs by focusing on FFN layers. In this work, we propose a novel channel idle mechanism that facilitates post-training structural reparameterization for efficient FFN layers during testing. Specifically, a set of feature channels remains idle and bypasses the nonlinear activation function in each FFN layer, thereby forming a linear pathway that enables structural reparameterization during inference. This mechanism results in a family of ReParameterizable Vision Transformers (RePaViTs), which achieve remarkable latency reductions with acceptable sacrifices (sometimes gains) in accuracy across various ViTs. The benefits of our method scale consistently with model sizes, demonstrating greater speed improvements and progressively narrowing accuracy gaps or even higher accuracies on larger models. In particular, RePa-ViT-Large and RePa-ViT-Huge enjoy 66.8% and 68.7% speed-ups with +1.7% and +1.1% higher top-1 accuracies under the same training strategy, respectively. RePaViT is the first to employ structural reparameterization on FFN layers to expedite ViTs to our best knowledge, and we believe that it represents an auspicious direction for efficient ViTs. Source code is available at https://github.com/Ackesnal/RePaViT.
title RePaViT: Scalable Vision Transformer Acceleration via Structural Reparameterization on Feedforward Network Layers
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21847