Title
Where to Prune: Using LSTM to Guide Data-Dependent Soft Pruning
Abstract
AbstractWhile convolutional neural network (CNN) has achieved overwhelming success in various vision tasks, its heavy computational cost and storage overhead limit the practical use on mobile or embedded devices. Recently, compressing CNN models has attracted considerable attention, where pruning CNN filters, also known as the channel pruning, has generated great research popularity due to its high compression rate. In this paper, a new channel pruning framework is proposed, which can significantly reduce the computational complexity while maintaining sufficient model accuracy. Unlike most existing approaches that seek to-be-pruned filters layer by layer, we argue that choosing appropriate layers for pruning is more crucial, which can result in more complexity reduction but less performance drop. To this end, we utilize a long short-term memory (LSTM) to learn the hierarchical characteristics of a network and generate a global network pruning scheme. On top of it, we propose a data-dependent soft pruning method, dubbed Squeeze-Excitation-Pruning (SEP), which does not physically prune any filters but selectively excludes some kernels involved in calculating forward and backward propagations depending on the pruning scheme. Compared with the hard pruning, our soft pruning can better retain the capacity and knowledge of the baseline model. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach still achieves comparable accuracy even when reducing 70.1% Floating-point operation per second (FLOPs) for VGG and 47.5% for Resnet-56.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/TIP.2020.3035028
Periodicals
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Computational modeling, Computer architecture, Reinforcement learning, Image coding, Training, Convolution, Tensors, Deep learning, model compression, computer vision, image classification
Journal
30
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
1
1057-7149
2
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.43
12
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Guiguang Ding1173180.28
Shuo Zhang220.43
Zizhou Jia3110.89
Jing Zhong4476.21
Jungong Han51785117.64