# Bridging The Gaps Between Token Pruning and Full Pre-training via Masked Fine-tuning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.17177 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17177/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Token pruning and merging for ViTs, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 49 of its 51 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Token pruning and merging for ViTs](https://mlsanity.com/inference/token-pruning-and-merging-for-vits/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 49)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Zero-Shot Text-to-Image Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12092/) (2021)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08254/) (2021)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [SwinIR: Image Restoration Using Swin Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10257/) (2021)
- [Is Space-Time Attention All You Need for Video Understanding?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05095/) (2021)
- [ViViT: A Video Vision Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15691/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [Rethinking Semantic Segmentation from a Sequence-to-Sequence Perspective with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.15840/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE: Masked Autoencoders are Data-Efficient Learners for Self-Supervised Video Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12602/) (2022)
- [SimMIM: A Simple Framework for Masked Image Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09886/) (2021)
- [CvT: Introducing Convolutions to Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15808/) (2021)
- [DynamicViT: Efficient Vision Transformers with Dynamic Token Sparsification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02034/) (2021)
- [PCT: Point cloud transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09688/) (2020)
- [Point-BERT: Pre-training 3D Point Cloud Transformers with Masked Point Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.14819/) (2021)
- [Transformer Interpretability Beyond Attention Visualization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.09838/) (2020)
- [VideoMAE V2: Scaling Video Masked Autoencoders with Dual Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16727/) (2023)
- [Masked Autoencoders for Point Cloud Self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06604/) (2022)
- [Masked Autoencoders As Spatiotemporal Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09113/) (2022)
- [Not All Patches are What You Need: Expediting Vision Transformers via Token Reorganizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07800/) (2022)
- [Scaling Language-Image Pre-training via Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.00794/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the success of transformers on various computer vision tasks, they suffer from excessive memory and computational cost. Some works present dynamic vision transformers to accelerate inference by pruning redundant tokens. A key to improving token pruning is using well-trained models as initialization for faster convergence and better performance. However, current base models usually adopt full image training, i.e., using full images as inputs and keeping the whole feature maps through the forward process, which causes inconsistencies with dynamic models that gradually reduce tokens, including calculation pattern, information amount and token selection strategy inconsistencies. Inspired by MAE which performs masking and reconstruction self-supervised task, we devise masked fine-tuning to bridge the gaps between pre-trained base models used for initialization and token pruning based dynamic vision transformers, by masking image patches and predicting the image class label based on left unmasked patches. Extensive experiments on ImageNet demonstrate that base models via masked fine-tuning gain strong occlusion robustness and ability against information loss. With this better initialization, Dynamic ViT achieves higher accuracies, especially under large token pruning ratios (e.g., 81.9% vs. 81.3%, and 62.3% vs. 58.9% for DeiT based Dynamic ViT/0.8 and Dynamic ViT/0.3). Moreover, we apply our method into different token pruning based dynamic vision transformers, different pre-trained models and randomly initialized models to demonstrate the generalization ability.