This invention discloses an adaptive MLP
pruning method for large-scale vision Transformers, addressing the practical deployment requirements of real-time
visual perception, low
power consumption, low latency, and high
throughput in scenarios such as robots, drones, and mobile terminals. It solves the technical problems of existing large-scale vision Transformers, including redundant parameters, high computational and memory overhead, slow
inference speed, and difficulty in edge deployment. The core method first accurately evaluates the importance of hidden neurons in the MLP based on Taylor expansion combined with the information
entropy criterion. Then, it adaptively prunes and sorts the neurons according to the redundancy of different MLP modules using a
binary search algorithm. Combined with knowledge
distillation, it restores the performance of the pruned model, ultimately achieving a reduction of approximately 40% in parameters and computational load, and increasing the
inference speed to about 1.5 times the original. This method not only demonstrates near-consistent performance with the original model in multiple benchmark tests such as zero-shot image classification, retrieval, and kNN evaluation, but also slightly surpasses it in some scenarios. Furthermore, it has the advantages of not relying on the original model's
loss function and additional modules, and being compatible with word
reduction methods. Ultimately, this invention provides a lightweight, high-performance, and easily adaptable practical solution for various application scenarios in the field of
computer vision that require efficient
model inference, and powerfully promotes the low-cost
engineering deployment and commercialization of large-vision
Transformer models.