text: We investigate learning to probabilistically bypass computations in a network architecture. Our approach is motivated by AIG, where layers are conditionally executed depending on their inputs, and the network is trained against a target bypass rate using a per-layer loss. We propose a per-batch loss function, and describe strategies for handling probabilistic bypass during inference as well as training. Per-batch loss allows the network additional flexibility. In particular, a form of mode collapse becomes plausible, where some layers are nearly always bypassed and some almost never; such a configuration is strongly discouraged by AIG's per-layer loss. We explore several inference-time strategies, including the natural MAP approach. With data-dependent bypass, we demonstrate improved performance over AIG. With data-independent bypass, as in stochastic depth, we observe mode collapse and effectively prune layers. We demonstrate our techniques on ResNet-50 and ResNet-101 for ImageNet , where our techniques produce improved accuracy (.15--.41 in precision@1) with substantially less computation (bypassing 25--40 of the layers).
  @cite_31: Do convolutional networks really need a fixed feed-forward structure? What if, after identifying the high-level concept of an image, a network could move directly to a layer that can distinguish fine-grained differences? Currently, a network would first need to execute sometimes hundreds of intermediate layers that specialize in unrelated aspects. Ideally, the more a network already knows about an image, the better it should be at deciding which layer to compute next. In this work, we propose convolutional networks with adaptive inference graphs (ConvNet-AIG) that adaptively define their network topology conditioned on the input image. Following a high-level structure similar to residual networks (ResNets), ConvNet-AIG decides for each input image on the fly which layers are needed. In experiments on ImageNet we show that ConvNet-AIG learns distinct inference graphs for different categories. Both ConvNet-AIG with 50 and 101 layers outperform their ResNet counterpart, while using (20 ) and (33 ) less computations respectively. By grouping parameters into layers for related classes and only executing relevant layers, ConvNet-AIG improves both efficiency and overall classification quality. Lastly, we also study the effect of adaptive inference graphs on the susceptibility towards adversarial examples. We observe that ConvNet-AIG shows a higher robustness than ResNets, complementing other known defense mechanisms.
summary: During train time, the activation rate, a hyperparameter set by the user, determines how frequently each individual gate should be open and the target loss is added to the classification loss, where activation loss is L2 of the difference between the target rate and current rate. Our work differs from @cite_31 several ways. We reformulate the loss to a per-batch loss and consider both data-dependent and data-independent layer bypass. Data-independent per-batch loss results in the network trying to remove enough layers to reach the target rate while retaining accuracy (similar to pruning techniques), while data-dependent per-batch loss has more flexibility to utilize layers.