Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the deployment of deep neural networks on resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose the so-called SCAN framework for networks training and inference, which is orthogonal and complementary to existing acceleration and compression methods. The proposed SCAN firstly divides neural networks into multiple sections according to their depth and constructs shallow classifiers upon the intermediate features of different sections. Moreover, attention modules and knowledge distillation are utilized to enhance the accuracy of shallow classifiers. Based on this architecture, we further propose a threshold controlled scalable inference mechanism to approach human-like sample-specific inference. Experimental results show that SCAN can be easily equipped on various neural networks without any adjustment on hyper-parameters or neural networks architectures, yielding significant performance gain on CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Codes will be released on github soon.

It is interesting to realize scalable neural networks in an architecture by introducing shallow classifiers. Actually, the motivation is not new as some recent work also investigated a similar objective [C1, C2, C3] by the anytime property. However, there are no analyses and comparison with the related studies which should be introduced and compared. The proposed framework is not that significant as the additional components are just borrowed from existing well-developed studies (attention, distillation) as well as the framework requires more parameters and computations. So the methodology itself is still incremental.

Reviewers had extensive discussions on this paper during the discussion phase. One comment was that the paper appeared to justify exclusively the empirical performance over methodological contributions. Other reviewers felt that the significant improvement in performance warranted publication. I concur on this latter view. As a note, and as reviewers have pointed out as well, there are many related works that the authors should contrast in their revised version.

Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the deployment of deep neural networks on resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose the so-called SCAN framework for networks training and inference, which is orthogonal and complementary to existing acceleration and compression methods. The proposed SCAN firstly divides neural networks into multiple sections according to their depth and constructs shallow classifiers upon the intermediate features of different sections. Moreover, attention modules and knowledge distillation are utilized to enhance the accuracy of shallow classifiers.

Remarkable achievements have been attained by deep neural networks in various applications. However, the increasing depth and width of such models also lead to explosive growth in both storage and computation, which has restricted the deployment of deep neural networks on resource-limited edge devices. To address this problem, we propose the so-called SCAN framework for networks training and inference, which is orthogonal and complementary to existing acceleration and compression methods. The proposed SCAN firstly divides neural networks into multiple sections according to their depth and constructs shallow classifiers upon the intermediate features of different sections. Moreover, attention modules and knowledge distillation are utilized to enhance the accuracy of shallow classifiers. Based on this architecture, we further propose a threshold controlled scalable inference mechanism to approach human-like sample-specific inference.