A Unified DNN Weight Compression Framework Using Reweighted Optimization Methods
This work addresses efficiency issues in DNN deployment for practitioners, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing pruning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of large model size and computation in deep neural networks by proposing a unified weight pruning framework that dynamically updates regularization terms to generate various sparsity patterns, achieving compression without accuracy loss.
To address the large model size and intensive computation requirement of deep neural networks (DNNs), weight pruning techniques have been proposed and generally fall into two categories, i.e., static regularization-based pruning and dynamic regularization-based pruning. However, the former method currently suffers either complex workloads or accuracy degradation, while the latter one takes a long time to tune the parameters to achieve the desired pruning rate without accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose a unified DNN weight pruning framework with dynamically updated regularization terms bounded by the designated constraint, which can generate both non-structured sparsity and different kinds of structured sparsity. We also extend our method to an integrated framework for the combination of different DNN compression tasks.