PAUMER: Patch Pausing Transformer for Semantic Segmentation
Evann Courdier Prabhu Teja Sivaprasad François Fleuret
We study the problem of improving the efficiency of segmentation transformers
by using disparate amounts of computation for different parts of the image. Our
method, PAUMER, accomplishes this by pausing computation for patches that are
deemed to not need any more computation before the final decoder. We use the
entropy of predictions computed from intermediate activations as the pausing
criterion, and find this aligns well with semantics of the image. Our method
has a unique advantage that a single network trained with the proposed strategy
can be effortlessly adapted at inference to various run-time requirements by
modulating its pausing parameters. On two standard segmentation datasets,
Cityscapes and ADE20K, we show that our method operates with about a $50\%$
higher throughput with an mIoU drop of about $0.65\%$ and $4.6\%$ respectively.