Dynamic Dual Gating Neural Networks

Fanrong Li, Gang Li, Xiangyu He, Jian Cheng; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 5330-5339

In dynamic neural networks that adapt computations to different inputs, gating-based methods have demonstrated notable generality and applicability in trading-off the model complexity and accuracy. However, existing works only explore the redundancy from a single point of the network, limiting the performance. In this paper, we propose dual gating, a new dynamic computing method, to reduce the model complexity at run-time. For each convolutional block, dual gating identifies the informative features along two separate dimensions, spatial and channel. Specifically, the spatial gating module estimates which areas are essential, and the channel gating module predicts the salient channels that contribute more to the results. Then the computation of both unimportant regions and irrelevant channels can be skipped dynamically during inference. Extensive experiments on a variety of datasets demonstrate that our method can achieve higher accuracy under similar computing budgets compared with other dynamic execution methods. In particular, dynamic dual gating can provide 59.7% saving in computing of ResNet50 with 76.41% top-1 accuracy on ImageNet, which has advanced the state-of-the-art.