Two-Stage Early Exiting From Globality Towards Reliability

Early exiting has shown significant potential in accelerating the inference of pre-trained language models (PLMs) by allowing easy samples to exit from shallow layers. However, existing early exiting methods primarily rely on local information from individual samples to estimate prediction uncertainty for making exiting decisions, overlooking the global information provided by the sample population. This impacts the estimation of prediction uncertainty, compromising the reliability of exiting decisions. To remedy this, inspired by principal component analysis (PCA), the authors define a residual score to capture the deviation of features from the principal space of the sample population, providing a global perspective for estimating prediction uncertainty. Building on this, a two-stage exiting strategy is proposed that integrates global information from residual scores with local information from energy scores at both the decision and feature levels. This strategy incorporates three-way decisions to enable more reliable exiting decisions for boundary region samples by delaying judgement. Extensive experiments on the GLUE benchmark validate that the method achieves an average speed-up ratio of 2.17× across all tasks with minimal performance degradation. Additionally, it surpasses the state-of-the-art E-LANG by $11\%$ in model acceleration, along with a performance improvement of 0.6 points, demonstrating a better performance-efficiency trade-off.