Bi-ViT: Pushing the Limit of Vision Transformer Quantization
Yanjing Li Sheng Xu Mingbao Lin Xianbin Cao Chuanjian Liu Xiao Sun Baochang Zhang
Vision transformers (ViTs) quantization offers a promising prospect to
facilitate deploying large pre-trained networks on resource-limited devices.
Fully-binarized ViTs (Bi-ViT) that pushes the quantization of ViTs to its limit
remain largely unexplored and a very challenging task yet, due to their
unacceptable performance. Through extensive empirical analyses, we identify the
severe drop in ViT binarization is caused by attention distortion in
self-attention, which technically stems from the gradient vanishing and ranking
disorder. To address these issues, we first introduce a learnable scaling
factor to reactivate the vanished gradients and illustrate its effectiveness
through theoretical and experimental analyses. We then propose a ranking-aware
distillation method to rectify the disordered ranking in a teacher-student
framework. Bi-ViT achieves significant improvements over popular DeiT and Swin
backbones in terms of Top-1 accuracy and FLOPs. For example, with DeiT-Tiny and
Swin-Tiny, our method significantly outperforms baselines by 22.1% and 21.4%
respectively, while 61.5x and 56.1x theoretical acceleration in terms of FLOPs
compared with real-valued counterparts on ImageNet.