Abstract
Split inference partitions a Vision Transformer between a resource-constrained edge device and a server. However, transmitting intermediate tokens across the communication channel is costly. Deploying fine-tuned backbones to every endpoint becomes expensive as well. We study token reduction for split inference under a frozen backbone, where only a small adapter is shipped. We observe that the CLS token plays a dual role: it acts as the global summary the receiver needs for classification, and it serves as a signal on which patches to keep. We propose Consommé, a method utilizing both characteristics. There, an information bottleneck compresses the CLS token into a compact latent which is transmitted in place of the full CLS token and conditions a learned patch gate merging patches into exactly $k$ tokens via soft assignment. It reaches any budget in a single step, thus escaping the per-layer cap of bipartite matching (BPM). On DeiT-S/T, it leads all methods at aggressive token budgets and remains operable at shallow splits where BPM cannot operate, while matching fine-tuned methods at gentle budgets at a fraction of their deployment cost.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.32794
