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 whether SFP-based methods and HFP can be combined to achieve better performance and speed up convergence. Firstly, we generalize SFP-based methods and HFP to analyze their characteristics. Then we propose a Gradually Hard Filter Pruning (GHFP) method to smoothly switch from SFP-based methods to HFP during training and pruning, thus maintaining a large search space at first, gradually reducing the capacity of the model to ensure a moderate convergence speed. Experimental results on CIFAR-10/100 show that our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance.
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Deep network pruning is an effective method to reduce the storage and computation cost of deep neural networks when applying them to resource-limited devices. Among many pruning granularities, neuron level pruning will remove redundant neurons and filters in the model and result in thinner networks. In this paper, we propose a gradually global pruning scheme for neuron level pruning. In each pruning step, a small percent of neurons were selected and dropped across all layers in the model. We also propose a simple method to eliminate the biases in evaluating the importance of neurons to make th…
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…
Neural network pruning is an important step in design process of efficient neural networks for edge devices with limited computational power. Pruning is a form of knowledge transfer from the weights of the original network to a smaller target subnetwork. We propose a new method for compute-constrained structured channel-wise pruning of convolutional neural networks. The method iteratively fine-tunes the network, while gradually tapering the computation resources available to the pruned network via a holonomic constraint in the method of Lagrangian multipliers framework. An explicit and adaptiv…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Unipart Group（优尼帕特集团）
Deep Neural Networks have been used in a wide variety of applications with significant success. However, their highly complex nature owing to comprising millions of parameters has lead to problems during deployment in pipelines with low latency requirements. As a result, it is more desirable to obtain lightweight neural networks which have the same performance during inference time. In this work, we propose a weight based pruning approach in which the weights are pruned gradually based on their momentum of the previous iterations. Each layer of the neural network is assigned an importance valu…
Regularization has long been utilized to learn sparsity in deep neural network pruning. However, its role is mainly explored in the small penalty strength regime. In this work, we extend its application to a new scenario where the regularization grows large gradually to tackle two central problems of pruning: pruning schedule and weight importance scoring. (1) The former topic is newly brought up in this work, which we find critical to the pruning performance while receives little research attention. Specifically, we propose an L2 regularization variant with rising penalty factors and show it …
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…
Efficient Unstructured Pruning of Mamba State-Space Models for Resource-Constrained Environments
Department of Computer Science, Iowa State University（计算机科学系，爱荷华州立大学）；Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, Iowa State University（土木、建设与环境工程系，爱荷华州立大学）
Isfahan University of Technology（伊斯法罕理工大学）；McMaster University（麦克马斯特大学）
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 fi…
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…
Finding Sparse Subnetworks in One Training Cycle via Progressive Magnitude-Based Pruning
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University of Jeddah（吉达大学）；King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals（法赫德国王石油矿产大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
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…
Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心（BNRist））；School of Software, Tsinghua University（清华大学软件学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；Department of Automation, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系）；Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Tsinghua University（清华大学脑与认知科学研究院）；WMG Data Science, University of Warwick（华威大学制造工程学院数据科学系）；Kwai Seattle AI Lab, Kwai FeDA Lab, Kwai AI platform（快手西雅图人工智能实验室、快手联邦与分布式人工智能实验室、快手人工智能平台）
Deep Neural Network (DNN) is powerful but computationally expensive and memory intensive, thus impeding its practical usage on resource-constrained front-end devices. DNN pruning is an approach for deep model compression, which aims at eliminating some parameters with tolerable performance degradation. In this paper, we propose a novel momentum-SGD-based optimization method to reduce the network complexity by on-the-fly pruning. Concretely, given a global compression ratio, we categorize all the parameters into two parts at each training iteration which are updated using different rules. In th…
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…
HiAP: A Multi-Granular Stochastic Auto-Pruning Framework for Vision Transformers
School of Natural and Computing Sciences, University of Aberdeen（阿伯丁大学自然与计算科学学院）；School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia（东安格利亚大学计算科学学院）；Department of Physics and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway（挪威北极大学物理与技术系）
Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）；Engineering Research Center of Safety Critical Industrial Measurement and Control Technology, Ministry of Education（教育部安全关键工业测控技术工程研究中心）
As the convolutional neural network (CNN) gets deeper and wider in recent years, the requirements for the amount of data and hardware resources have gradually increased. Meanwhile, CNN also reveals salient redundancy in several tasks. The existing magnitude-based pruning methods are efficient, but the performance of the compressed network is unpredictable. While the accuracy loss after pruning based on the structure sensitivity is relatively slight, the process is time-consuming and the algorithm complexity is notable. In this article, we propose a novel automatic channel pruning method (ACP).…
Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
Model compression techniques are recently gaining explosive attention for obtaining efficient AI models for various real-time applications. Channel pruning is one important compression strategy and is widely used in slimming various DNNs. Previous gate-based or importance-based pruning methods aim to remove channels whose importance is smallest. However, it remains unclear what criteria the channel importance should be measured on, leading to various channel selection heuristics. Some other sampling-based pruning methods deploy sampling strategies to train sub-nets, which often causes the trai…
HiPose: Hierarchical Binary Surface Encoding and Correspondence Pruning for RGB-D 6DoF Object Pose Estimation
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心）；RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau（凯撒斯劳滕-兰道工业大学）；Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Google（谷歌公司）
Efficient search is a core issue in Neural Architecture Search (NAS). It is difficult for conventional NAS algorithms to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks like ImageNet. In general, the cost of GPU hours for NAS grows with regard to training dataset size and candidate set size. One common way is searching on a smaller proxy dataset (e.g., CIFAR-10) and then transferring to the target task (e.g., ImageNet). These architectures optimized on proxy data are not guaranteed to be optimal on the target task. Another common way is learning with a smaller candidate set, which may r…
Pushing the Limits of Sparsity: A Bag of Tricks for Extreme Pruning
Department of Computing Science University of Aberdeen, UK（计算科学系阿伯丁大学，英国）；Department of Computing Science & Interdisciplinary Institute University of Aberdeen, UK（计算科学系与跨学科研究所阿伯丁大学，英国）；Department of Computer Science University of Exeter, UK（计算机科学系埃克塞特大学，英国）；Intel Labs, USA（英特尔实验室，美国）；Department of Computer Science University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US（计算机科学系北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校，美国）；School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering University of Surrey, UK（计算机科学与电子工程学院 Surrey大学，英国）
National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）；Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院）
Neural architecture search (NAS) has brought significant progress in recent image recognition tasks. Most existing NAS methods apply restricted search spaces, which limits the upper-bound performance of searched models. To address this issue, we propose a new search space named MobileNet3-MT. By reducing human-prior knowledge in omni dimensions of networks, MobileNet3-MT accommodates more potential candidates. For searching in this challenging search space, we present an efficient Multi-trial Evolution-based NAS method termed MENAS. Specifically, we accelerate the evolutionary search process b…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Neural architecture search (NAS) with an accuracy predictor that predicts the accuracy of candidate architectures has drawn increasing attention due to its simplicity and effectiveness. Previous works usually employ neural network-based predictors which require more delicate design and are easy to overfit. Considering that most architectures are represented as sequences of discrete symbols which are more like tabular data and preferred by non-neural predictors, in this paper, we study an alternative approach which uses non-neural model for accuracy prediction. Specifically, as decision tree ba…
School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学电气、计算机与能源工程学院）
Catastrophic forgetting is a notorious issue in deep learning, referring to the fact that Deep Neural Networks (DNN) could forget the knowledge about earlier tasks when learning new tasks. To address this issue, continual learning has been developed to learn new tasks sequentially and perform knowledge transfer from the old tasks to the new ones without forgetting. While recent structure-based learning methods show the capability of alleviating the forgetting problem, these methods start from a redundant full-size network and require a complex learning process to gradually grow-and-prune or se…
Xiamen University of Technology（厦门理工学院）；ReLER, University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学ReLER研究所）
This paper focuses on network pruning for image retrieval acceleration. Prevailing image retrieval works target at the discriminative feature learning, while little attention is paid to how to accelerate the model inference, which should be taken into consideration in real-world practice. The challenge of pruning image retrieval models is that the middle-level feature should be preserved as much as possible. Such different requirements of the retrieval and classification model make the traditional pruning methods not that suitable for our task. To solve the problem, we propose a new Progressiv…
