# Uncertainty-Guided Spatial Pruning Architecture for Efficient Frame Interpolation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16555 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16555/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jul 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
- [SegNet: A Deep Convolutional Encoder-Decoder Architecture for Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00561/) (2015)
- [Dynamic Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04906/) (2021)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [Softmax Splatting for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.05534/) (2020)
- [Depth-Aware Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00830/) (2019)
- [Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Separable Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01692/) (2017)
- [Real-Time Intermediate Flow Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.06294/) (2020)
- [Video Frame Synthesis using Deep Voxel Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.02463/) (2017)
- [UnFlow: Unsupervised Learning of Optical Flow with a Bidirectional Census Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07837/) (2017)
- [BlockDrop: Dynamic Inference Paths in Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08393/) (2017)
- [View Synthesis by Appearance Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.03557/) (2016)
- [Adaptive Neural Networks for Efficient Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.07811/) (2017)
- [Video Frame Interpolation via Adaptive Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07514/) (2017)
- [Context-aware Synthesis for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.10967/) (2018)
- [Quadratic video interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00627/) (2019)
- [Video Compression through Image Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.06919/) (2018)
- [AdaCoF: Adaptive Collaboration of Flows for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.10244/) (2019)
- [Data Uncertainty Learning in Face Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.11339/) (2020)
- [Video Frame Interpolation Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13817/) (2021)
- [BMBC:Bilateral Motion Estimation with Bilateral Cost Volume for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12622/) (2020)
- [MEMC-Net: Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation Driven Neural Network for Video Interpolation and Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.08768/) (2018)
- [IFRNet: Intermediate Feature Refine Network for Efficient Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14620/) (2022)
- [Asymmetric Bilateral Motion Estimation for Video Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06815/) (2021)
- [ClassSR: A General Framework to Accelerate Super-Resolution Networks by Data Characteristic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04039/) (2021)
- [QueryDet: Cascaded Sparse Query for Accelerating High-Resolution Small Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09136/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Sparse Transformer for Hyperspectral Image Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04845/) (2022)
- [Multiple Video Frame Interpolation via Enhanced Deformable Separable Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08070/) (2020)
- [CDFI: Compression-Driven Network Design for Frame Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10559/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The video frame interpolation (VFI) model applies the convolution operation to all locations, leading to redundant computations in regions with easy motion. We can use dynamic spatial pruning method to skip redundant computation, but this method cannot properly identify easy regions in VFI tasks without supervision. In this paper, we develop an Uncertainty-Guided Spatial Pruning (UGSP) architecture to skip redundant computation for efficient frame interpolation dynamically. Specifically, pixels with low uncertainty indicate easy regions, where the calculation can be reduced without bringing undesirable visual results. Therefore, we utilize uncertainty-generated mask labels to guide our UGSP in properly locating the easy region. Furthermore, we propose a self-contrast training strategy that leverages an auxiliary non-pruning branch to improve the performance of our UGSP. Extensive experiments show that UGSP maintains performance but reduces FLOPs by 34%/52%/30% compared to baseline without pruning on Vimeo90K/UCF101/MiddleBury datasets. In addition, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance with lower FLOPs on multiple benchmarks.