MutualNet: Adaptive ConvNet via Mutual Learning From Different Model Configurations

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2023

Abstract

Most existing deep neural networks are static, which means they can only perform inference at a fixed complexity. But the resource budget can vary substantially across different devices. Even on a single device, the affordable budget can change with different scenarios, and repeatedly training networks for each required budget would be incredibly expensive. Therefore, in this work, we propose a general method called MutualNet to train a single network that can run at a diverse set of resource constraints. Our method trains a cohort of model configurations with various network widths and input resolutions. This mutual learning scheme not only allows the model to run at different width-resolution configurations but also transfers the unique knowledge among these configurations, helping the model to learn stronger representations overall. MutualNet is a general training methodology that can be applied to various network structures (e.g., 2D networks: MobileNets, ResNet, 3D networks: SlowFast, X3D) and various tasks (e.g., image classification, object detection, segmentation, and action recognition), and is demonstrated to achieve consistent improvements on a variety of datasets. Since we only train the model once, it also greatly reduces the training cost compared to independently training several models. Surprisingly, MutualNet can also be used to significantly boost the performance of a single network, if dynamic resource constraints are not a concern. In summary, MutualNet is a unified method for both static and adaptive, 2D and 3D networks. Code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/taoyang1122/MutualNet.

Identifier

85122290885 (Scopus)

Publication Title

IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence

External Full Text Location

https://doi.org/10.1109/TPAMI.2021.3138389

e-ISSN

19393539

ISSN

01628828

PubMed ID

34962861

First Page

811

Last Page

827

Issue

1

Volume

45

Grant

2003198

Fund Ref

Intel Corporation

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