Filters are the essential elements in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Filters are corresponded to the feature maps and form the main part of the computational and memory requirement for the CNN processing. In filter pruning methods, a filter with all of its components, including channels and connections, are removed. The removal of a filter can cause a drastic change in the network's performance. Also, the removed filters cannot come back to the network structure. We want to address these problems in this paper. We propose a CNN pruning method based on filter attenuation in which weak filters are not directly removed. Instead, weak filters are attenuated and gradually removed. In the proposed attenuation approach, weak filters are not abruptly removed, and there is a chance for these filters to return to the network. The filter attenuation method is assessed using the VGG model for the Cifar10 image classification task. Simulation results show that the filter attenuation works with different pruning criteria, and better results are obtained in comparison with the conventional pruning methods.
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Tencent Youtu Lab（腾讯优图实验室）
Pruning has become a very powerful and effective technique to compress and accelerate modern neural networks. Existing pruning methods can be grouped into two categories: filter pruning (FP) and weight pruning (WP). FP wins at hardware compatibility but loses at the compression ratio compared with WP. To converge the strength of both methods, we propose to prune the filter in the filter. Specifically, we treat a filter $F \in \mathbb{R}^{C\times K\times K}$ as $K \times K$ stripes, i.e., $1\times 1$ filters $\in \mathbb{R}^{C}$, then by pruning the stripes instead of the whole filter, we can a…
George Mason University（乔治梅森大学）；Clarkson University（克拉克森大学）
Based on filter magnitude ranking (e.g. L1 norm), conventional filter pruning methods for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been proved with great effectiveness in computation load reduction. Although effective, these methods are rarely analyzed in a perspective of filter functionality. In this work, we explore the filter pruning and the retraining through qualitative filter functionality interpretation. We find that the filter magnitude based method fails to eliminate the filters with repetitive functionality. And the retraining phase is actually used to reconstruct the remained filte…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has an amount of parameter redundancy, filter pruning aims to remove the redundant filters and provides the possibility for the application of CNN on terminal devices. However, previous works pay more attention to designing evaluation criteria of filter importance and then prune less important filters with a fixed pruning rate or a fixed number to reduce convolutional neural networks' redundancy. It does not consider how many filters to reserve for each layer is the most reasonable choice. From this perspective, we propose a new filter pruning method by searc…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Nuctech AI R&D Center（Nuctech人工智能研发中心）
Filter pruning has drawn more attention since resource constrained platform requires more compact model for deployment. However, current pruning methods suffer either from the inferior performance of one-shot methods, or the expensive time cost of iterative training methods. In this paper, we propose a balanced filter pruning method for both performance and pruning speed. Based on the filter importance criteria, our method is able to prune a layer with approximate layer-wise optimal pruning rate at preset loss variation. The network is pruned in the layer-wise way without the time consuming pr…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；A*STAR Centre for Frontier AI Research (CFAR)（新加坡科技研究局前沿人工智能研究中心）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）
Filter pruning is effective to reduce the computational costs of neural networks. Existing methods show that updating the previous pruned filter would enable large model capacity and achieve better performance. However, during the iterative pruning process, even if the network weights are updated to new values, the pruning criterion remains the same. In addition, when evaluating the filter importance, only the magnitude information of the filters is considered. However, in neural networks, filters do not work individually, but they would affect other filters. As a result, the magnitude informa…
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（新型软件技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Nanjing（南京）；China（中国）
Channel pruning is an important family of methods to speed up deep model's inference. Previous filter pruning algorithms regard channel pruning and model fine-tuning as two independent steps. This paper argues that combining them into a single end-to-end trainable system will lead to better results. We propose an efficient channel selection layer, namely AutoPruner, to find less important filters automatically in a joint training manner. Our AutoPruner takes previous activation responses as an input and generates a true binary index code for pruning. Hence, all the filters corresponding to zer…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；HeFei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Pruning filters is an effective method for accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs), but most existing approaches prune filters on a pre-trained network directly which limits in acceleration. Although each filter has its own effect in DNNs, but if two filters are the same with each other, we could prune one safely. In this paper, we add an extra cluster loss term in the loss function which can force filters in each cluster to be similar online. After training, we keep one filter in each cluster and prune others and fine-tune the pruned network to compensate for the loss. Particularly, the clus…
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（国立台湾科技大学）
Pruning redundant filters in CNN models has received growing attention. In this paper, we propose an adaptive binary search-first hybrid pyramid- and clustering-based (ABSHPC-based) method for pruning filters automatically. In our method, for each convolutional layer, initially a hybrid pyramid data structure is constructed to store the hierarchical information of each filter. Given a tolerant accuracy loss, without parameters setting, we begin from the last convolutional layer to the first layer; for each considered layer with less or equal pruning rate relative to its previous layer, our ABS…
Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）
This paper proposed a Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) method to accelerate the inference procedure of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, the proposed SFP enables the pruned filters to be updated when training the model after pruning. SFP has two advantages over previous works: (1) Larger model capacity. Updating previously pruned filters provides our approach with larger optimization space than fixing the filters to zero. Therefore, the network trained by our method has a larger model capacity to learn from the training data. (2) Less dependence on the pre-trained model. Large …
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has achieved significant success in computer vision field. However, the high computational cost of the deep complex models prevents the deployment on edge devices with limited memory and computational resource. In this paper, we proposed a novel filter pruning for convolutional neural networks compression, namely spectral clustering filter pruning with soft self-adaption manners (SCSP). We first apply spectral clustering on filters layer by layer to explore their intrinsic connections and only count on efficient groups. By self-adaption manners, the pru…
Korea Institute of Science and Technology（韩国科学技术研究院）
Even though norm-based filter pruning methods are widely accepted, it is questionable whether the "smaller-norm-less-important" criterion is optimal in determining filters to prune. Especially when we can keep only a small fraction of the original filters, it is more crucial to choose the filters that can best represent the whole filters regardless of norm values. Our novel pruning method entitled "REPrune" addresses this problem by selecting representative filters via clustering. By selecting one filter from a cluster of similar filters and avoiding selecting adjacent large filters, REPrune c…
Neural network pruning is a widely used strategy for reducing model storage and computing requirements. It allows to lower the complexity of the network by introducing sparsity in the weights. Because taking advantage of sparse matrices is still challenging, pruning is often performed in a structured way, i.e. removing entire convolution filters in the case of ConvNets, according to a chosen pruning criteria. Common pruning criteria, such as l1-norm or movement, usually do not consider the individual utility of filters, which may lead to: (1) the removal of filters exhibiting rare, thus import…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Youtu Laboratory, Tencent（腾讯优图实验室）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能创想研究院）；Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（穆罕默德·本·扎耶德人工智能大学）；National Tsing Hua University（国立清华大学）
This paper focuses on filter-level network pruning. A novel pruning method, termed CLR-RNF, is proposed. We first reveal a "long-tail" long-tail pruning problem in magnitude-based weight pruning methods, and then propose a computation-aware measurement for individual weight importance, followed by a Cross-Layer Ranking (CLR) of weights to identify and remove the bottom-ranked weights. Consequently, the per-layer sparsity makes up of the pruned network structure in our filter pruning. Then, we introduce a recommendation-based filter selection scheme where each filter recommends a group of its c…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Hangdian University（杭州电子科技大学）
Deeper and wider Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) achieve superior performance but bring expensive computation cost. Accelerating such over-parameterized neural network has received increased attention. A typical pruning algorithm is a three-stage pipeline, i.e., training, pruning, and retraining. Prevailing approaches fix the pruned filters to zero during retraining, and thus significantly reduce the optimization space. Besides, they directly prune a large number of filters at first, which would cause unrecoverable information loss. To solve these problems, we propose an Asymptotic Soft F…
University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）；CETC（中国电子科技集团公司）；Huawei（华为）；Baidu Research（百度研究院）
Previous works utilized ''smaller-norm-less-important'' criterion to prune filters with smaller norm values in a convolutional neural network. In this paper, we analyze this norm-based criterion and point out that its effectiveness depends on two requirements that are not always met: (1) the norm deviation of the filters should be large; (2) the minimum norm of the filters should be small. To solve this problem, we propose a novel filter pruning method, namely Filter Pruning via Geometric Median (FPGM), to compress the model regardless of those two requirements. Unlike previous methods, FPGM c…
Acceleration of convolutional neural network has received increasing attention during the past several years. Among various acceleration techniques, filter pruning has its inherent merit by effectively reducing the number of convolution filters. However, most filter pruning methods resort to tedious and time-consuming layer-by-layer pruning-recovery strategy to avoid a significant drop of accuracy. In this paper, we present an efficient filter pruning framework to solve this problem. Our method accelerates the network in one-step pruning-recovery manner with a novel optimization objective func…
Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sri City（斯里城印度信息技术学院）；Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad（阿拉哈巴德印度信息技术学院）；DryvAmigo（DryvAmigo公司）
This paper proposes an Information Bottleneck theory based filter pruning method that uses a statistical measure called Mutual Information (MI). The MI between filters and class labels, also called \textit{Relevance}, is computed using the filter's activation maps and the annotations. The filters having High Relevance (HRel) are considered to be more important. Consequently, the least important filters, which have lower Mutual Information with the class labels, are pruned. Unlike the existing MI based pruning methods, the proposed method determines the significance of the filters purely based …
In this paper, we analyze two popular network compression techniques, i.e. filter pruning and low-rank decomposition, in a unified sense. By simply changing the way the sparsity regularization is enforced, filter pruning and low-rank decomposition can be derived accordingly. This provides another flexible choice for network compression because the techniques complement each other. For example, in popular network architectures with shortcut connections (e.g. ResNet), filter pruning cannot deal with the last convolutional layer in a ResBlock while the low-rank decomposition methods can. In addit…
University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；SUNY at Buffalo（纽约州立大学布法罗分校）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Midea Corporate Research Center（美的集团研究院）
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks~(CNNs) offer remarkable performance of classifications and regressions in many high-dimensional problems and have been widely utilized in real-word cognitive applications. However, high computational cost of CNNs greatly hinder their deployment in resource-constrained applications, real-time systems and edge computing platforms. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel filter-pruning framework, two-phase filter pruning based on conditional entropy, namely \textit{2PFPCE}, to compress the CNN models and reduce the inference time with marginal performance…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学信息技术学院）
Deep learning has achieved impressive results in many areas, but the deployment of edge intelligent devices is still very slow. To solve this problem, we propose a novel compression and acceleration method based on data distribution characteristics for deep neural networks, namely Pruning Filter via Gaussian Distribution Feature (PFGDF). Compared with previous advanced pruning methods, PFGDF compresses the model by filters with insignificance in distribution, regardless of the contribution and sensitivity information of the convolution filter. PFGDF is significantly different from weight spars…
University of Tennessee（田纳西大学）；Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）
Most existing channel pruning methods formulate the pruning task from a perspective of inefficiency reduction which iteratively rank and remove the least important filters, or find the set of filters that minimizes some reconstruction errors after pruning. In this work, we investigate the channel pruning from a new perspective with statistical modeling. We hypothesize that the number of filters at a certain layer reflects the level of 'redundancy' in that layer and thus formulate the pruning problem from the aspect of redundancy reduction. Based on both theoretic analysis and empirical studies…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are typically over-parameterized, bringing considerable computational overhead and memory footprint in inference. Pruning a proportion of unimportant filters is an efficient way to mitigate the inference cost. For this purpose, identifying unimportant convolutional filters is the key to effective filter pruning. Previous work prunes filters according to either their weight norms or the corresponding batch-norm scaling factors, while neglecting the sequential dependency between adjacent layers. In this paper, we further develop the norm-based importance esti…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd.（华为技术有限公司）
We propose a novel network pruning approach by information preserving of pre-trained network weights (filters). Network pruning with the information preserving is formulated as a matrix sketch problem, which is efficiently solved by the off-the-shelf Frequent Direction method. Our approach, referred to as FilterSketch, encodes the second-order information of pre-trained weights, which enables the representation capacity of pruned networks to be recovered with a simple fine-tuning procedure. FilterSketch requires neither training from scratch nor data-driven iterative optimization, leading to a…
Neural network pruning is one of the most popular methods of accelerating the inference of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The dominant pruning methods, filter-level pruning methods, evaluate their performance through the reduction ratio of computations and deem that a higher reduction ratio of computations is equivalent to a higher acceleration ratio in terms of inference time. However, we argue that they are not equivalent if parallel computing is considered. Given that filter-level pruning only prunes filters in layers and computations in a layer usually run in parallel, most com…
Fudan University（复旦大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
Global channel pruning (GCP) aims to remove a subset of channels (filters) across different layers from a deep model without hurting the performance. Previous works focus on either single task model pruning or simply adapting it to multitask scenario, and still face the following problems when handling multitask pruning: 1) Due to the task mismatch, a well-pruned backbone for classification task focuses on preserving filters that can extract category-sensitive information, causing filters that may be useful for other tasks to be pruned during the backbone pruning stage; 2) For multitask predic…
Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on the wide variety of tasks (classification, detection, etc.) across multiple domains at the cost of high computational and memory requirements. Thus, leveraging CNNs for real-time applications necessitates model compression approaches that not only reduce the total number of parameters but reduce the overall computation as well. In this work, we present a stability-based approach for filter-level pruning of CNNs. We evaluate our proposed approach on different architectures (LeNet, VGG-16, ResNet, and Faster RCNN) and da…
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology（计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
This paper aims to simultaneously accelerate and compress off-the-shelf CNN models via filter pruning strategy. The importance of each filter is evaluated by the proposed entropy-based method first. Then several unimportant filters are discarded to get a smaller CNN model. Finally, fine-tuning is adopted to recover its generalization ability which is damaged during filter pruning. Our method can reduce the size of intermediate activations, which would dominate most memory footprint during model training stage but is less concerned in previous compression methods. Experiments on the ILSVRC-12 b…
Filter Pruning for Efficient CNNs via Knowledge-driven Differential Filter Sampler
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）；Tencent（腾讯）；University of Sheffield（谢菲尔德大学）；University at Buffalo（布法罗大学）
We propose an efficient and unified framework, namely ThiNet, to simultaneously accelerate and compress CNN models in both training and inference stages. We focus on the filter level pruning, i.e., the whole filter would be discarded if it is less important. Our method does not change the original network structure, thus it can be perfectly supported by any off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. We formally establish filter pruning as an optimization problem, and reveal that we need to prune filters based on statistics information computed from its next layer, not the current layer, which diff…
Robert Bosch GmbH（罗伯特·博世有限公司）；University of Lübeck（吕贝克大学）
Unstructured pruning is well suited to reduce the memory footprint of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), both at training and inference time. CNNs contain parameters arranged in $K \times K$ filters. Standard unstructured pruning (SP) reduces the memory footprint of CNNs by setting filter elements to zero, thereby specifying a fixed subspace that constrains the filter. Especially if pruning is applied before or during training, this induces a strong bias. To overcome this, we introduce interspace pruning (IP), a general tool to improve existing pruning methods. It uses filters represented i…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Network pruning is widely used to compress Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). The Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) method zeroizes the pruned filters during training while updating them in the next training epoch. Thus the trained information of the pruned filters is completely dropped. To utilize the trained pruned filters, we proposed a SofteR Filter Pruning (SRFP) method and its variant, Asymptotic SofteR Filter Pruning (ASRFP), simply decaying the pruned weights with a monotonic decreasing parameter. Our methods perform well across various networks, datasets and pruning rates, also transferable to weig…
Department of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程系）；Robert Bosch Centre for Data Science and AI (RBC-DSAI)（罗伯特·博世数据科学与人工智能中心（RBC-DSAI））；Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Recently there has been a lot of work on pruning filters from deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with the intention of reducing computations. The key idea is to rank the filters based on a certain criterion (say, $l_1$-norm, average percentage of zeros, etc) and retain only the top ranked filters. Once the low scoring filters are pruned away the remainder of the network is fine tuned and is shown to give performance comparable to the original unpruned network. In this work, we report experiments which suggest that the comparable performance of the pruned network is not due to the specif…
Structured pruning techniques have achieved great compression performance on convolutional neural networks for image classification task. However, the majority of existing methods are weight-oriented, and their pruning results may be unsatisfactory when the original model is trained poorly. That is, a fully-trained model is required to provide useful weight information. This may be time-consuming, and the pruning results are sensitive to the updating process of model parameters. In this paper, we propose a metric named Average Filter Information Entropy (AFIE) to measure the importance of each…
The sophisticated structure of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) allows for outstanding performance, but at the cost of intensive computation. As significant redundancies inevitably present in such a structure, many works have been proposed to prune the convolutional filters for computation cost reduction. Although extremely effective, most works are based only on quantitative characteristics of the convolutional filters, and highly overlook the qualitative interpretation of individual filter's specific functionality. In this work, we interpreted the functionality and redundancy of the convol…
Xiamen University（厦门大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Pinterest（品趣志）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（人工智能创想研究院）
Neural network pruning offers a promising prospect to facilitate deploying deep neural networks on resource-limited devices. However, existing methods are still challenged by the training inefficiency and labor cost in pruning designs, due to missing theoretical guidance of non-salient network components. In this paper, we propose a novel filter pruning method by exploring the High Rank of feature maps (HRank). Our HRank is inspired by the discovery that the average rank of multiple feature maps generated by a single filter is always the same, regardless of the number of image batches CNNs rec…
Guilin University of Technology（桂林理工大学）；Southern University of Science and Technology（南方科技大学）；Sichuan University（四川大学）
Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) tracking has wide potential applications in such as agriculture, navigation, and public security. However, the limitations of computing resources, battery capacity, and maximum load of UAV hinder the deployment of deep learning-based tracking algorithms on UAV. Consequently, discriminative correlation filters (DCF) trackers stand out in the UAV tracking community because of their high efficiency. However, their precision is usually much lower than trackers based on deep learning. Model compression is a promising way to narrow the gap (i.e., effciency, precision) b…
Electrostatic Force Regularization for Neural Structured Pruning
Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France（上法兰西理工大学）；Université de Lille（里尔大学）；Université Paris Est Créteil（巴黎东克雷泰伊大学）；National Higher School of Biotechnology（国家高等生物技术学校）
Network pruning in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been extensively investigated in recent years. To determine the impact of pruning a group of filters on a network's accuracy, state-of-the-art pruning methods consistently assume filters of a CNN are independent. This allows the importance of a group of filters to be estimated as the sum of importances of individual filters. However, overparameterization in modern networks results in highly correlated filters that invalidate this assumption, thereby resulting in incorrect importance estimates. To address this issue, we propose OrthoRe…
Filter pruning is a common method to achieve model compression and acceleration in deep neural networks (DNNs).Some research regarded filter pruning as a combinatorial optimization problem and thus used evolutionary algorithms (EA) to prune filters of DNNs. However, it is difficult to find a satisfactory compromise solution in a reasonable time due to the complexity of solution space searching. To solve this problem, we first formulate a multi-objective optimization problem based on a sub-network of the full model and propose a Sub-network Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithm (SMOEA) for filt…
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…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）
Filter pruning method introduces structural sparsity by removing selected filters and is thus particularly effective for reducing complexity. Previous works empirically prune networks from the point of view that filter with smaller norm contributes less to the final results. However, such criteria has been proven sensitive to the distribution of filters, and the accuracy may hard to recover since the capacity gap is fixed once pruned. In this paper, we propose a novel filter pruning method called Asymptotic Soft Cluster Pruning (ASCP), to identify the redundancy of network based on the similar…
Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学）
Even though the Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) has shown superior results in the field of computer vision, it is still a challenging task to implement computer vision algorithms in real-time at the edge, especially using a low-cost IoT device due to high memory consumption and computation complexities in a CNN. Network compression methodologies such as weight pruning, filter pruning, and quantization are used to overcome the above mentioned problem. Even though filter pruning methodology has shown better performances compared to other techniques, irregularity of the number of filters prun…
Cranberry-Lemon University（蔓越莓柠檬大学）；University of the Witwatersrand（金山大学）
Deep Neural Networks(DNNs) have many parameters and activation data, and these both are expensive to implement. One method to reduce the size of the DNN is to quantize the pre-trained model by using a low-bit expression for weights and activations, using fine-tuning to recover the drop in accuracy. However, it is generally difficult to train neural networks which use low-bit expressions. One reason is that the weights in the middle layer of the DNN have a wide dynamic range and so when quantizing the wide dynamic range into a few bits, the step size becomes large, which leads to a large quanti…
College of Information Engineering, Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学信息工程学院）；Hang Zhou, People’s Republic of China（杭州，中华人民共和国）
Previous AutoML pruning works utilized individual layer features to automatically prune filters. We analyze the correlation for two layers from the different blocks which have a short-cut structure. It shows that, in one block, the deeper layer has many redundant filters which can be represented by filters in the former layer. So, it is necessary to take information from other layers into consideration in pruning. In this paper, a novel pruning method, named GraphPruning, is proposed. Any series of the network is viewed as a graph. To automatically aggregate neighboring features for each node,…
Modern pattern recognition methods are based on convolutional networks since they are able to learn complex patterns that benefit the classification. However, convolutional networks are computationally expensive and require a considerable amount of memory, which limits their deployment on low-power and resource-constrained systems. To handle these problems, recent approaches have proposed pruning strategies that find and remove unimportant neurons (i.e., filters) in these networks. Despite achieving remarkable results, existing pruning approaches are ineffective since the accuracy of the origi…
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Filter pruning is widely used to reduce the computation of deep learning, enabling the deployment of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in resource-limited devices. Conventional Hard Filter Pruning (HFP) method zeroizes pruned filters and stops updating them, thus reducing the search space of the model. On the contrary, Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) simply zeroizes pruned filters, keeping updating them in the following training epochs, thus maintaining the capacity of the network. However, SFP, together with its variants, converges much slower than HFP due to its larger search space. Our question is whet…
While convolutional neural networks (CNN) have achieved impressive performance on various classification/recognition tasks, they typically consist of a massive number of parameters. This results in significant memory requirement as well as computational overheads. Consequently, there is a growing need for filter-level pruning approaches for compressing CNN based models that not only reduce the total number of parameters but reduce the overall computation as well. We present a new min-max framework for filter-level pruning of CNNs. Our framework, called Play and Prune (PP), jointly prunes and f…
IIT Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；R&D Center, Hitachi India Pvt. Ltd.（日立印度私人有限公司研发中心）；Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）
We propose a framework for compressing state-of-the-art Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD). The framework addresses compression in the following stages: Sparsity Induction, Filter Selection, and Filter Pruning. In the Sparsity Induction stage, the object detector model is sparsified via an improved global threshold. In Filter Selection & Pruning stage, we select and remove filters using sparsity statistics of filter weights in two consecutive convolutional layers. This results in the model with the size smaller than most existing compact architectures. We evaluate the performance of our frame…
The University of Tennessee Knoxville（田纳西大学诺克斯维尔分校）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Convolutional neural network (CNN) pruning has become one of the most successful network compression approaches in recent years. Existing works on network pruning usually focus on removing the least important filters in the network to achieve compact architectures. In this study, we claim that identifying structural redundancy plays a more essential role than finding unimportant filters, theoretically and empirically. We first statistically model the network pruning problem in a redundancy reduction perspective and find that pruning in the layer(s) with the most structural redundancy outperfor…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））
Filter pruning has attracted increasing attention in recent years for its capacity in compressing and accelerating convolutional neural networks. Various data-independent criteria, including norm-based and relationship-based ones, were proposed to prune the most unimportant filters. However, these state-of-the-art criteria fail to fully consider the dissimilarity of filters, and thus might lead to performance degradation. In this paper, we first analyze the limitation of relationship-based criteria with examples, and then introduce a new data-independent criterion, Weighted Hybrid Criterion (W…
Filter pruning is one of the most effective ways to accelerate and compress convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose a global filter pruning algorithm called Gate Decorator, which transforms a vanilla CNN module by multiplying its output by the channel-wise scaling factors, i.e. gate. When the scaling factor is set to zero, it is equivalent to removing the corresponding filter. We use Taylor expansion to estimate the change in the loss function caused by setting the scaling factor to zero and use the estimation for the global filter importance ranking. Then we prune the n…
