The Effects of Grouped Structural Global Pruning of Vision Transformers on Domain Generalisation

With the growing sizes of AI models like large language models (LLMs) and vision transformers, deploying them on devices with limited computational resources is a significant challenge particularly when addressing domain generalisation (DG) tasks. This paper introduces a novel grouped structural pruning method for pre-trained vision transformers (ViT, BeiT, and DeiT), evaluated on the PACS and Office-Home DG benchmarks. Our method uses dependency graph analysis to identify and remove redundant groups of neurons, weights, filters, or attention heads within transformers, using a range of selection metrics. Grouped structural pruning is applied at pruning ratios of 50%, 75% and 95% and the models are then fine-tuned on selected distributions from DG benchmarks to evaluate their overall performance in DG tasks. Results show significant improvements in inference speed and fine-tuning time with minimal trade-offs in accuracy and DG task performance. For instance, on the PACS benchmark, pruning ViT, BeiT, and DeiT models by 50% using the Hessian metric resulted in accuracy drops of only -2.94%, -1.42%, and -1.72%, respectively, while achieving speed boosts of 2.5x, 1.81x, and 2.15x. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in balancing model efficiency with domain generalisation performance.