Papers › MiniViT: Compressing Vision Transformers with Weight Multiplexing

MiniViT: Compressing Vision Transformers with Weight Multiplexing

14 Apr 2022CVPR 2022 1arXiv:2204.07154archive 2025-07-28

Jinnian Zhang, Houwen Peng, Kan Wu, Mengchen Liu, Bin Xiao, Jianlong Fu, Lu Yuan

Vision Transformer (ViT) models have recently drawn much attention in computer vision due to their high model capability. However, ViT models suffer from huge number of parameters, restricting their applicability on devices with limited memory. To alleviate this problem, we propose MiniViT, a new compression framework, which achieves parameter reduction in vision transformers while retaining the same performance. The central idea of MiniViT is to multiplex the weights of consecutive transformer blocks. More specifically, we make the weights shared across layers, while imposing a transformation on the weights to increase diversity. Weight distillation over self-attention is also applied to transfer knowledge from large-scale ViT models to weight-multiplexed compact models. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of MiniViT, showing that it can reduce the size of the pre-trained Swin-B transformer by 48\%, while achieving an increase of 1.0\% in Top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Moreover, using a single-layer of parameters, MiniViT is able to compress DeiT-B by 9.7 times from 86M to 9M parameters, without seriously compromising the performance. Finally, we verify the transferability of MiniViT by reporting its performance on downstream benchmarks. Code and models are available at here.

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BasicLayer microsoft/AutoML/MiniViT/Mini-Swin/models/swin_transformer_minivit.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 2cbff10d73eb7a6c · report
SwinTransformerBlock microsoft/AutoML/MiniViT/Mini-Swin/models/swin_transformer_minivit.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 4f8688d9e12ea3d2 · report
SwinTransformerMiniViT microsoft/AutoML/MiniViT/Mini-Swin/models/swin_transformer_minivit.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 9d3f653a351ddc1b · report
WindowAttention microsoft/AutoML/MiniViT/Mini-Swin/models/swin_transformer_minivit.py community (archive-listed) unverified MIT (permissive) · 3095ac15907de9ab · report

Tasks

DiversityImage Classification

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Image Classification ImageNet Mini-Swin-B@384 GFLOPs 98.8 #220 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet Mini-Swin-B@384 Number of params 47M #220 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report
Image Classification ImageNet Mini-Swin-B@384 Top 1 Accuracy 85.5% #220 of 1060 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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