SAMPL: Self-Attention Modelled Patch Learning for Efficient Visual Understanding
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the patch selection problem for efficient transformer-based visual understanding wherein a sampler can be used to drop less informative patches at inference in order to speed up model execution on resource-constrained devices. As no labels are available on the saliency of the patches, existing works either try to solve an auxiliary task of locating distinctive patches or learn a policy network through the global image/video-level supervision. The former approach could drop redundant but important patches while the latter suffers from the weak supervision of a single class label per image/video. In this work, we observe that the attention weights in trained transformer-based models clearly highlight the salient regions in images and videos. Therefore, we propose a learned patch sampling framework called SAMPL that utilizes the attention weights as fine-grained patch-level supervision to learn a lightweight policy network for patch selection. To train SAMPL end-to-end with the transformer-based models, we introduce a new loss function based on the REINFORCE algorithm to match the distribution of patch selection probabilities and the attention scores. Experimental results on ImageNet, UCF101, Something-Something v2 and Kinetics-400 show that SAMPL can effectively increase the throughput by at least 1.5× while achieving competitive classification accuracy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".