  Vision transformer (ViT) has achieved competitive accuracy on a variety of
computer vision applications, but its computational cost impedes the deployment
on resource-limited mobile devices.
  We explore the sparsity in ViT and observe that informative patches and heads
are sufficient for accurate image recognition.
  In this paper, we propose a cascade pruning framework named CP-ViT by
predicting sparsity in ViT models progressively and dynamically to reduce
computational redundancy while minimizing the accuracy loss. Specifically, we
define the cumulative score to reserve the informative patches and heads across
the ViT model for better accuracy. We also propose the dynamic pruning ratio
adjustment technique based on layer-aware attention range. CP-ViT has great
general applicability for practical deployment, which can be applied to a wide
range of ViT models and can achieve superior accuracy with or without
fine-tuning.
  Extensive experiments on ImageNet, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100 with various
pre-trained models have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of
CP-ViT. By progressively pruning 50\% patches, our CP-ViT method reduces over
40\% FLOPs while maintaining accuracy loss within 1\%.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition;Artificial Intelligence