To Exit or Not to Exit: Cost-Effective Early-Exit Architecture Based on Markov Decision Process

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Recently, studies on early-exit mechanisms have emerged to reduce the computational cost during the inference process of deep learning models. However, most existing early-exit architectures simply determine early exiting based only on a target confidence level in the prediction, without any consideration of the computational cost. Such an early-exit criterion fails to balance accuracy and cost, making it difficult to use in various environments. To address this problem, we propose a novel, cost-effective early-exit architecture in which an early-exit criterion is designed based on the Markov decision process (MDP). Since the early-exit decisions within an early-exit model are sequential, we model them as an MDP problem to maximize accuracy as much as possible while minimizing the computational cost. Then, we develop a cost-effective early-exit algorithm using reinforcement learning that solves the MDP problem. For each input sample, the algorithm dynamically makes early-exit decisions considering the relative importance of accuracy and computational cost in a given environment, thereby balancing the trade-off between accuracy and cost regardless of the environment. Consequently, it can be used in various environments, even in a resource-constrained environment. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed architecture can effectively balance the trade-off in different environments, while the existing architectures fail to do so since they focus only on reducing their cost while preventing the degradation of accuracy.