Title
BlockDrop: Dynamic Inference Paths in Residual Networks.
Abstract
Very deep convolutional neural networks offer excellent recognition results, yet their computational expense limits their impact for many real-world applications. We introduce BlockDrop, an approach that learns to dynamically choose which layers of a deep network to execute during inference so as to best reduce total computation without degrading prediction accuracy. Exploiting the robustness of Residual Networks (ResNets) to layer dropping, our framework selects on-the-fly which residual blocks to evaluate for a given novel image. In particular, given a pretrained ResNet, we train a policy network in an associative reinforcement learning setting for the dual reward of utilizing a minimal number of blocks while preserving recognition accuracy. We conduct extensive experiments on CIFAR and ImageNet. The results provide strong quantitative and qualitative evidence that these learned policies not only accelerate inference but also encode meaningful visual information. Built upon a ResNet-101 model, our method achieves a speedup of 20% on average, going as high as 36% for some images, while maintaining the same 76.4% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/cvpr.2018.00919
computer vision and pattern recognition
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
abs/1711.08393
18
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.60
34
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zuxuan Wu149629.79
Tushar Nagarajan2181.62
abhishek kumar394335.34
Steven J. Rennie430224.77
Larry S. Davis5142012690.83
Kristen Grauman66258326.34
Rogério Feris7152989.95