In this work, we propose a new layer-by-layer channel pruning method called Channel Pruning guided by classification Loss and feature Importance (CPLI). In contrast to the existing layer-by-layer channel pruning approaches that only consider how to reconstruct the features from the next layer, our approach additionally take the classification loss into account in the channel pruning process. We also observe that some reconstructed features will be removed at the next pruning stage. So it is unnecessary to reconstruct these features. To this end, we propose a new strategy to suppress the influence of unimportant features (i.e., the features will be removed at the next pruning stage). Our comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets, i.e., CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and UCF-101, demonstrate the effectiveness of our CPLI method.
Back to Fundamentals: Low-Level Visual Features Guided Progressive Token Pruning
Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；University of Michigan – Shanghai Jiao Tong University Joint Institute（密歇根大学-上海交通大学联合学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University（西交利物浦大学）
EntropyPrune: Matrix Entropy Guided Visual Token Pruning for Multimodal Large Language Models
School of Computer Science and Technology, Tongji University（同济大学计算机科学与技术学院）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克ruz分校）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Eye Disease Prevention and Treatment Center（上海眼病预防与治疗中心）
Intel Labs（英特尔实验室）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Phenomenally successful in practical inference problems, convolutional neural networks (CNN) are widely deployed in mobile devices, data centers, and even supercomputers. The number of parameters needed in CNNs, however, are often large and undesirable. Consequently, various methods have been developed to prune a CNN once it is trained. Nevertheless, the resulting CNNs offer limited benefits. While pruning the fully connected layers reduces a CNN's size considerably, it does not improve inference speed noticeably as the compute heavy parts lie in convolutions. Pruning CNNs in a way that increa…
Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have achieved remarkable success in many computer vision tasks recently, but the huge number of parameters and the high computation overhead hinder their deployments on resource-constrained edge devices. It is worth noting that channel pruning is an effective approach for compressing DNN models. A critical challenge is to determine which channels are to be removed, so that the model accuracy will not be negatively affected. In this paper, we first propose Spatial and Channel Attention (SCA), a new attention module combining both spatial and channel attention that re…
MADTP: Multimodal Alignment-Guided Dynamic Token Pruning for Accelerating Vision-Language Transformer
School of Information Science and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学信息科学与技术学院）；Academy for Engineering and Technology, Fudan University（复旦大学工程技术研究院）；Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳国际研究生院（清华-伯克利深圳学院））
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；IBM T. J. Watson Research（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；DeepMind（深度思维）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究）；UMIACS（马里兰大学信息研究实验室（UMIACS））；Google（谷歌）
To reduce the significant redundancy in deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), most existing methods prune neurons by only considering statistics of an individual layer or two consecutive layers (e.g., prune one layer to minimize the reconstruction error of the next layer), ignoring the effect of error propagation in deep networks. In contrast, we argue that it is essential to prune neurons in the entire neuron network jointly based on a unified goal: minimizing the reconstruction error of important responses in the "final response layer" (FRL), which is the second-to-last layer before cla…
Spectral Evolution-Guided Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models
School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Digital-Intelligence Service Technology（浙江省数字化服务技术重点实验室）；The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学）；The University of Southern Queensland（南昆士兰大学）
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）
Mix-and-Match Pruning: Globally Guided Layer-Wise Sparsification of DNNs
1 Brandenburg Technical University, Cottbus, Germany；2 University of Zanjan, Iran；3 Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia；4 Leibniz Institute for High Performance Microelectronics, Frankfurt Oder, Germany
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…
FedX: Explanation-Guided Pruning for Communication-Efficient Federated Learning in Remote Sensing
Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Technische Universität Berlin（电气工程与计算机科学学院，柏林技术大学）；BIFOLD - Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data（柏林学习与数据基础研究所）
Illinois Institute of Technology（伊利诺伊理工学院）；Texas State University（德克萨斯州立大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）
With the remarkable success of deep learning recently, efficient network compression algorithms are urgently demanded for releasing the potential computational power of edge devices, such as smartphones or tablets. However, optimal network pruning is a non-trivial task which mathematically is an NP-hard problem. Previous researchers explain training a pruned network as buying a lottery ticket. In this paper, we investigate the Magnitude-Based Pruning (MBP) scheme and analyze it from a novel perspective through Fourier analysis on the deep learning model to guide model designation. Besides expl…
Structured pruning efficiently compresses networks by identifying and removing unimportant neurons. While this can be elegantly achieved by applying sparsity-inducing regularisation on BatchNorm parameters, an L1 penalty would shrink all scaling factors rather than just those of superfluous neurons. To tackle this issue, we introduce a simple BatchNorm variation with bounded scaling parameters, based on which we design a novel regularisation term that suppresses only neurons with low importance. Under our method, the weights of unnecessary neurons effectively recede, producing a polarised bimo…
Teacher-Guided One-Shot Pruning via Context-Aware Knowledge Distillation
Apurba-NSU R&D Lab, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh（阿普尔巴-NSU研发实验室，电气与计算机工程系，北方南大学，达卡，孟加拉国）；Apurba Technologies, Sunnyvale, CA 94085, USA（阿普尔巴技术公司，硅谷，加利福尼亚州94085，美国）
Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning: A Fidelity-Guided Criterion for Extreme Structured Channel Compression
School of Computer, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology（江苏科技大学计算机学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Nevada, Las Vegas（内华达大学拉斯维加斯分校电子与计算机工程系）
Multimodal-Guided Dynamic Dataset Pruning for Robust and Efficient Data-Centric Learning
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（新型软件技术国家重点实验室，南京大学）；Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学计算机科学与工程学院）；College of Computer Science, Sichuan University（四川大学计算机学院）
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…
Neural Network Pruning for Real-time Polyp Segmentation
NepAl Applied Mathematics and Informatics Institute (NAAMII)（尼泊尔应用数学与信息学研究所（NAAMII））；Fogsphere (Redev AI Ltd)（Fogsphere（Redev AI有限公司））；University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学）
SGLP: A Similarity Guided Fast Layer Partition Pruning for Compressing Large Deep Models
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；Zhejiang University of Technology（浙江工业大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Southwest University（西南大学）；The City College of New York（纽约城市学院）；Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology（深圳大学）
University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）
Existing pruning techniques preserve deep neural networks' overall ability to make correct predictions but may also amplify hidden biases during the compression process. We propose a novel pruning method, Fairness-aware GRAdient Pruning mEthod (FairGRAPE), that minimizes the disproportionate impacts of pruning on different sub-groups. Our method calculates the per-group importance of each model weight and selects a subset of weights that maintain the relative between-group total importance in pruning. The proposed method then prunes network edges with small importance values and repeats the pr…
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…
SIMPLER: Efficient Foundation Model Adaptation via Similarity-Guided Layer Pruning for Earth Observation
Centro Singular de Investigación en Tecnoloxías Intelixentes (CiTIUS), Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain（智能技术研究中心（CiTIUS），圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学，西班牙）；Departmento de Electrónica e Computación, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain（电子与计算系，圣地亚哥-德孔波斯特拉大学，西班牙）；IBM Research Europe, Zurich, Switzerland（IBM欧洲研究院，瑞士苏黎世）
Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；MILA；IMT Atlantique（IMT大西洋高等矿业学院）；Lab-STICC（STICC实验室）；ISCAS 2019（ISCAS 2019（会议名称，不提取））
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are state-of-the-art in numerous computer vision tasks such as object classification and detection. However, the large amount of parameters they contain leads to a high computational complexity and strongly limits their usability in budget-constrained devices such as embedded devices. In this paper, we propose a combination of a new pruning technique and a quantization scheme that effectively reduce the complexity and memory usage of convolutional layers of CNNs, and replace the complex convolutional operation by a low-cost multiplexer. We perform experimen…
Structural pruning of neural network parameters reduces computation, energy, and memory transfer costs during inference. We propose a novel method that estimates the contribution of a neuron (filter) to the final loss and iteratively removes those with smaller scores. We describe two variations of our method using the first and second-order Taylor expansions to approximate a filter's contribution. Both methods scale consistently across any network layer without requiring per-layer sensitivity analysis and can be applied to any kind of layer, including skip connections. For modern networks trai…
Conventional NAS-based pruning algorithms aim to find the sub-network with the best validation performance. However, validation performance does not successfully represent test performance, i.e., potential performance. Also, although fine-tuning the pruned network to restore the performance drop is an inevitable process, few studies have handled this issue. This paper provides a novel Ensemble Knowledge Guidance (EKG) to solve both problems at once. First, we experimentally prove that the fluctuation of loss landscape can be an effective metric to evaluate the potential performance. In order t…
The advancement of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on various vision applications has attracted lots of attention. Yet the majority of CNNs are unable to satisfy the strict requirement for real-world deployment. To overcome this, the recent popular network pruning is an effective method to reduce the redundancy of the models. However, the ranking of filters according to their "importance" on different pruning criteria may be inconsistent. One filter could be important according to a certain criterion, while it is unnecessary according to another one, which indicates that each criterion is…
Auto-Train-Once: Controller Network Guided Automatic Network Pruning from Scratch
University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；Bosch Center for AI（博世人工智能中心）；GE HealthCare（GE医疗）；College of William and Mary（威廉玛丽学院）；Purdue University（普渡大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
本文提出 Auto-Train-Once (ATO) 网络剪枝算法，通过引入控制器网络指导目标模型权重学习并采用新颖随机梯度算法增强训练协调，解决了现有 OTO 方法局部最优收敛问题，在多个标准数据集和模型架构上实现最先进性能。
Channel pruning is one of the predominant approaches for accelerating deep neural networks. Most existing pruning methods either train from scratch with a sparsity inducing term such as group lasso, or prune redundant channels in a pretrained network and then fine tune the network. Both strategies suffer from some limitations: the use of group lasso is computationally expensive, difficult to converge and often suffers from worse behavior due to the regularization bias. The methods that start with a pretrained network either prune channels uniformly across the layers or prune channels based on …
Adaptive network pruning approach has recently drawn significant attention due to its excellent capability to identify the importance and redundancy of layers and filters and customize a suitable pruning solution. However, it remains unsatisfactory since current adaptive pruning methods rely mostly on an additional monitor to score layer and filter importance, and thus faces high complexity and weak interpretability. To tackle these issues, we have deeply researched the weight reconstruction process in iterative prune-train process and propose a Protective Self-Adaptive Pruning (PSAP) method. …
SpecVLM: Enhancing Speculative Decoding of Video LLMs via Verifier-Guided Token Pruning
The State Key Laboratory of Blockchain and Data Security（区块链与数据安全国家重点实验室）；Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security（杭州高新技术区（滨江）区块链与数据安全研究院）；Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学计算机系）；School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Fabu Inc.（法布公司）；Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Institute of Frontier Technologies（阿里巴巴-浙江大学前沿技术联合研究院）；GAC R&D Center（广汽研究院）
Neural network compression empowers the effective yet unwieldy deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) to be deployed in resource-constrained scenarios. Most state-of-the-art approaches prune the model in filter-level according to the "importance" of filters. Despite their success, we notice they suffer from at least two of the following problems: 1) The redundancy among filters is not considered because the importance is evaluated independently. 2) Cross-layer filter comparison is unachievable since the importance is defined locally within each layer. Consequently, we must manually specify l…
SenseTime Research（商汤科技研究院）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Sun Yat-Sen University（中山大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
Channel pruning is a popular technique for compressing convolutional neural networks (CNNs), where various pruning criteria have been proposed to remove the redundant filters. From our comprehensive experiments, we found two blind spots in the study of pruning criteria: (1) Similarity: There are some strong similarities among several primary pruning criteria that are widely cited and compared. According to these criteria, the ranks of filters'Importance Score are almost identical, resulting in similar pruned structures. (2) Applicability: The filters'Importance Score measured by some pruning c…
Towards Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Embedded Hardware via Multi-Dimensional Pruning
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；HP-NTU Digital Manufacturing Corporate Lab, Nanyang Technological University（惠普-南洋理工大学数字制造联合实验室）；Department of Computer Science, Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学计算机科学系）
Guangdong Provincial People’s Hospital（广东省人民医院）；University of Notre Dame（圣母大学）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Many works have shown that deep learning-based medical image classification models can exhibit bias toward certain demographic attributes like race, gender, and age. Existing bias mitigation methods primarily focus on learning debiased models, which may not necessarily guarantee all sensitive information can be removed and usually comes with considerable accuracy degradation on both privileged and unprivileged groups. To tackle this issue, we propose a method, FairPrune, that achieves fairness by pruning. Conventionally, pruning is used to reduce the model size for efficient inference. However…
College of Computer Science, Sichuan Normal University（四川师范大学计算机科学学院）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Channel pruning has demonstrated its effectiveness in compressing ConvNets. In many related arts, the importance of an output feature map is only determined by its associated filter. However, these methods ignore a small part of weights in the next layer which disappears as the feature map is removed. They ignore the phenomenon of weight dependency. Besides, many pruning methods use only one criterion for evaluation and find a sweet spot of pruning structure and accuracy in a trial-and-error fashion, which can be time-consuming. In this paper, we proposed a channel pruning algorithm via multi-…
EECS Department（EECS系）；University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ann Arbor, MI 48105, USA（美国密歇根州安娜堡市48105（注意：这部分按要求不应提取，此处为错误识别，正确应为仅保留大学/学院/公司/研究院级别，即仅提取University of Michigan，而EECS Department是系别，不应提取，Ann Arbor是城市，不应提取。修正后正确输出应为{）
Recent network pruning methods focus on pruning models early-on in training. To estimate the impact of removing a parameter, these methods use importance measures that were originally designed to prune trained models. Despite lacking justification for their use early-on in training, such measures result in surprisingly low accuracy loss. To better explain this behavior, we develop a general framework that uses gradient flow to unify state-of-the-art importance measures through the norm of model parameters. We use this framework to determine the relationship between pruning measures and evoluti…
