A Simple Romance Between Multi-Exit Vision Transformer and Token Reduction

Vision Transformers (ViTs) are now flourishing in the computer vision area. Despite the remarkable success, ViTs suffer from high computational costs, which greatly hinder their practical usage. Token reduction, which identifies and discards unimportant tokens during forward propagation, has then been proposed to make ViTs more efficient. For token reduction methodologies, a scoring metric is essential to distinguish between important and unimportant tokens. The attention score from the $\mathrm{[CLS]}$ token, which takes the responsibility to aggregate useful information and form the final output, has been established by prior works as an advantageous choice. Nevertheless, whereas the task pressure is applied at the end of the whole model, token reduction generally starts from very early blocks. Given the long distance in between, in the early blocks, $\mathrm{[CLS]}$ token lacks the impetus to gather task-relevant information, causing somewhat arbitrary attention allocation. This phenomenon, in turn, degrades the reliability of token scoring and substantially compromises the effectiveness of token reduction. Inspired by advances in the domain of dynamic neural networks, in this paper, we introduce Multi-Exit Token Reduction (METR), a simple romance between multi-exit architecture and token reduction—two areas previously considered orthogonal. By injecting early task pressure via multi-exit loss, the $\mathrm{[CLS]}$ token is spurred to collect task-related information in even early blocks, thus bolstering the credibility of $\mathrm{[CLS]}$ attention as a token-scoring metric. Additionally, we employ self-distillation to further refine the quality of early supervision. Extensive experiments substantiate both the existence and effectiveness of the newfound chemistry. Comparative assessments also indicate that METR outperforms state-of-the-art token reduction methods on standard benchmarks, especially under aggressive reduction ratios.