Yu-Hsun Lin

Yu-Hsun Lin, Chun-Nan Chou, Edward Y. Chang

In this paper we propose the macroblock scaling (MBS) algorithm, which can be applied to various CNN architectures to reduce their model size. MBS adaptively reduces each CNN macroblock depending on its information redundancy measured by our proposed effective flops. Empirical studies conducted with ImageNet and CIFAR-10 attest that MBS can reduce the model size of some already compact CNN models, e.g., MobileNetV2 (25.03% further reduction) and ShuffleNet (20.74%), and even ultra-deep ones such as ResNet-101 (51.67%) and ResNet-1202 (72.71%) with negligible accuracy degradation. MBS also performs better reduction at a much lower cost than the state-of-the-art optimization-based methods do. MBS's simplicity and efficiency, its flexibility to work with any CNN model, and its scalability to work with models of any depth make it an attractive choice for CNN model size reduction.

Yu-Hsun Lin, Chun-Nan Chou, Edward Y. Chang

This paper proposes BRIEF, a backward reduction algorithm that explores compact CNN-model designs from the information flow perspective. This algorithm can remove substantial non-zero weighting parameters (redundant neural channels) of a network by considering its dynamic behavior, which traditional model-compaction techniques cannot achieve. With the aid of our proposed algorithm, we achieve significant model reduction on ResNet-34 in the ImageNet scale (32.3% reduction), which is 3X better than the previous result (10.8%). Even for highly optimized models such as SqueezeNet and MobileNet, we can achieve additional 10.81% and 37.56% reduction, respectively, with negligible performance degradation.