With deep learning's success, a limited number of popular deep nets have been widely adopted for various vision tasks. However, this usually results in unnecessarily high complexities and possibly many features of low task utility. In this paper, we address this problem by introducing a task-dependent deep pruning framework based on Fisher's Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA). The approach can be applied to convolutional, fully-connected, and module-based deep network structures, in all cases leveraging the high decorrelation of neuron motifs found in the pre-decision space and cross-layer deconv dependency. Moreover, we examine our approach's potential in network architecture search for specific tasks and analyze the influence of our pruning on model robustness to noises and adversarial attacks. Experimental results on datasets of generic objects (ImageNet, CIFAR100) as well as domain specific tasks (Adience, and LFWA) illustrate our framework's superior performance over state-of-the-art pruning approaches and fixed compact nets (e.g. SqueezeNet, MobileNet). The proposed method successfully maintains comparable accuracies even after discarding most parameters (98%-99% for VGG16, up to 82% for the already compact InceptionNet) and with significant FLOP reductions (83% for VGG16, up to 64% for InceptionNet). Through pruning, we can also derive smaller, but more accurate and more robust models suitable for the task.
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Chongqing University（重庆大学）；Megvii Inc.（旷视科技）
In this paper, a simple yet effective network pruning framework is proposed to simultaneously address the problems of pruning indicator, pruning ratio, and efficiency constraint. This paper argues that the pruning decision should depend on the convolutional weights, and thus proposes novel weight-dependent gates (W-Gates) to learn the information from filter weights and obtain binary gates to prune or keep the filters automatically. To prune the network under efficiency constraints, a switchable Efficiency Module is constructed to predict the hardware latency or FLOPs of candidate pruned netwo…
Chengdu Union Big Data Technology Co. Ltd.（成都联合大数据科技有限公司）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Channel pruning is a promising technique to compress the parameters of deep convolutional neural networks(DCNN) and to speed up the inference. This paper aims to address the long-standing inefficiency of channel pruning. Most channel pruning methods recover the prediction accuracy by re-training the pruned model from the remaining parameters or random initialization. This re-training process is heavily dependent on the sufficiency of computational resources, training data, and human interference(tuning the training strategy). In this paper, a highly efficient pruning method is proposed to sign…
Institute for Infocomm Research（资讯通信研究院）；Peking University（北京大学）；MIT（麻省理工学院）
In this work, we focus on the problem of image instance retrieval with deep descriptors extracted from pruned Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The objective is to heavily prune convolutional edges while maintaining retrieval performance. To this end, we introduce both data-independent and data-dependent heuristics to prune convolutional edges, and evaluate their performance across various compression rates with different deep descriptors over several benchmark datasets. Further, we present an end-to-end framework to fine-tune the pruned network, with a triplet loss function specially desig…
Structured pruning, especially channel pruning is widely used for the reduced computational cost and the compatibility with off-the-shelf hardware devices. Among existing works, weights are typically removed using a predefined global threshold, or a threshold computed from a predefined metric. The predefined global threshold based designs ignore the variation among different layers and weights distribution, therefore, they may often result in sub-optimal performance caused by over-pruning or under-pruning. In this paper, we present a simple yet effective method, termed Optimal Thresholding (OT…
Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
Making deep convolutional neural networks more accurate typically comes at the cost of increased computational and memory resources. In this paper, we reduce this cost by exploiting the fact that the importance of features computed by convolutional layers is highly input-dependent, and propose feature boosting and suppression (FBS), a new method to predictively amplify salient convolutional channels and skip unimportant ones at run-time. FBS introduces small auxiliary connections to existing convolutional layers. In contrast to channel pruning methods which permanently remove channels, it pres…
Many real-time tasks, such as human-computer interaction, require fast and efficient facial gender classification. Although deep CNN nets have been very effective for a multitude of classification tasks, their high space and time demands make them impractical for personal computers and mobile devices without a powerful GPU. In this paper, we develop a 16-layer, yet lightweight, neural network which boosts efficiency while maintaining high accuracy. Our net is pruned from the VGG-16 model starting from the last convolutional (conv) layer where we find neuron activations are highly uncorrelated …
Selectivity Drives Efficiency: Dataset Pruning for Visual Place Recognition
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳先进技术研究院）
Ritsumeikan University（立命馆大学）；Hitotsubashi University（一桥大学）；Nagoya University（名古屋大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）
One-shot Network Pruning at Initialization (OPaI) is an effective method to decrease network pruning costs. Recently, there is a growing belief that data is unnecessary in OPaI. However, we obtain an opposite conclusion by ablation experiments in two representative OPaI methods, SNIP and GraSP. Specifically, we find that informative data is crucial to enhancing pruning performance. In this paper, we propose two novel methods, Discriminative One-shot Network Pruning (DOP) and Super Stitching, to prune the network by high-level visual discriminative image patches. Our contributions are as follow…
The tree pruning process is the key to promoting fruits' growth and improving their productions due to effects on the photosynthesis efficiency of fruits and nutrition transportation in branches. Currently, pruning is still highly dependent on human labor. The workers' experience will strongly affect the robustness of the performance of the tree pruning. Thus, it is a challenge for workers and farmers to evaluate the pruning performance. Intended for a better solution to the problem, this paper presents a novel pruning classification strategy model called "OTSU-SVM" to evaluate the pruning per…
Recent years have seen a paradigm shift towards multi-task learning. This calls for memory and energy-efficient solutions for inference in a multi-task scenario. We propose an algorithm-hardware co-design approach called MIME. MIME reuses the weight parameters of a trained parent task and learns task-specific threshold parameters for inference on multiple child tasks. We find that MIME results in highly memory-efficient DRAM storage of neural-network parameters for multiple tasks compared to conventional multi-task inference. In addition, MIME results in input-dependent dynamic neuronal prunin…
Which Layer Causes Distribution Deviation? Entropy-Guided Adaptive Pruning for Diffusion and Flow Models
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；North China Electric Power University（华北电力大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Since the deep learning model is highly dependent on hyperparameters, hyperparameter optimization is essential in developing deep learning model-based applications, even if it takes a long time. As service development using deep learning models has gradually become competitive, many developers highly demand rapid hyperparameter optimization algorithms. In order to keep pace with the needs of faster hyperparameter optimization algorithms, researchers are focusing on improving the speed of hyperparameter optimization algorithm. However, the huge time consumption of hyperparameter optimization du…
NTK-SAP: Improving neural network pruning by aligning training dynamics
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Shenzhen International Center for Industrial and Applied Mathematics（深圳国际工业与应用数学中心）；Shenzhen Research Institute of Big Data（深圳大数据研究院）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
