Once For All Skip: Efficient Adaptive Deep Neural Networks

In this paper, we propose a new module, namely once for all skip (OFAS), for adaptive deep neural networks to efficiently control the block skip within a DNN model. The novelty of OFAS is that it only needs to compute once for all skippable blocks to determine their execution states. Moreover, since adaptive DNN models with OFAS cannot achieve the best accuracy and efficiency in end-to-end training, we propose a reinforcement learning-based training method to enhance the training procedure. The experimental results with different models and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency in comparison to the state of the arts. The code is available at https://github.com/ieslab-ynu/OFAS.