Cooperative Learning for Cost-Adaptive Inference

We propose a cooperative training framework for deep neural network architectures that enables the runtime network depths to change to satisfy dynamic computing resource requirements. In our framework, the number of layers participating in computation can be chosen dynamically to meet performance-cost trade-offs at inference runtime. Our method trains two Teammate nets and a Leader net, and two sets of Teammate sub-networks with various depths through knowledge distillation. The Teammate nets derive sub-networks and transfer knowledge to them, and to each other, while the Leader net guides Teammate nets to ensure accuracy. The approach trains the framework atomically at once instead of individually training various sizes of models; in a sense, the various-sized networks are all trained at once, in a "package deal." The proposed framework is not tied to any specific architecture but can incorporate any existing models/architectures, therefore it can maintain stable results and is insensitive to the size of a dataset's feature map. Compared with other related approaches, it provides comparable accuracy to its full network while various sizes of models are available.