Title
Automated Pruning For Deep Neural Network Compression
Abstract
In this work we present a method to improve the pruning step of the current state-of-the-art methodology to compress neural networks. The novelty of the proposed pruning technique is in its differentiability, which allows pruning to be performed during the backpropagation phase of the network training. This enables an end-to-end learning and strongly reduces the training time. The technique is based on a family of differentiable pruning functions and a new regularizer specifically designed to enforce pruning. The experimental results show that the joint optimization of both the thresholds and the network weights permits to reach a higher compression rate, reducing the number of weights of the pruned network by a further 14% to 33% compared to the current state-of-the-art. Furthermore, we believe that this is the first study where the generalization capabilities in transfer learning tasks of the features extracted by a pruned network are analyzed. To achieve this goal, we show that the representations learned using the proposed pruning methodology maintain the same effectiveness and generality of those learned by the corresponding non-compressed network on a set of different recognition tasks.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ICPR.2018.8546129
2018 24TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON PATTERN RECOGNITION (ICPR)
DocType
Volume
ISSN
Conference
abs/1712.01721
1051-4651
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
2
0.35
30
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Franco Manessi1232.35
Alessandro Rozza2899.22
Simone Bianco322624.48
Paolo Napoletano433937.19
Raimondo Schettini51476154.06