  It is desirable to train convolutional networks (CNNs) to run more
efficiently during inference. In many cases however, the computational budget
that the system has for inference cannot be known beforehand during training,
or the inference budget is dependent on the changing real-time resource
availability. Thus, it is inadequate to train just inference-efficient CNNs,
whose inference costs are not adjustable and cannot adapt to varied inference
budgets. We propose a novel approach for cost-adjustable inference in CNNs -
Stochastic Downsampling Point (SDPoint). During training, SDPoint applies
feature map downsampling to a random point in the layer hierarchy, with a
random downsampling ratio. The different stochastic downsampling configurations
known as SDPoint instances (of the same model) have computational costs
different from each other, while being trained to minimize the same prediction
loss. Sharing network parameters across different instances provides
significant regularization boost. During inference, one may handpick a SDPoint
instance that best fits the inference budget. The effectiveness of SDPoint, as
both a cost-adjustable inference approach and a regularizer, is validated
through extensive experiments on image classification.
