Efficient Multi-Scale Feature Generation Adaptive Network

Recently, an early exit network, which dynamically adjusts the model complexity during inference time, has achieved remarkable performance and neural network efficiency to be used for various applications. So far, many researchers have been focusing on reducing the redundancy of input sample or model architecture. However, they were unsuccessful at resolving the performance drop of early classifiers that make predictions with insufficient high-level feature information. Consequently, the performance degradation of early classifiers had a devastating effect on the entire network performance sharing the backbone. Thus, in this paper, we propose an Efficient Multi-Scale Feature Generation Adaptive Network (EMGNet), which not only reduced the redundancy of the architecture but also generates multi-scale features to improve the performance of the early exit network. Our approach renders multi-scale feature generation highly efficient through sharing weights in the center of the convolution kernel. Also, our gating network effectively learns to automatically determine the proper multi-scale feature ratio required for each convolution layer in different locations of the network. We demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art adaptive networks on CIFAR10, CIFAR100, and ImageNet datasets. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/lee-gwang/EMGNet