Dynamic Structure Pruning for Compressing CNNs
This work addresses the need for more efficient and hardware-compatible neural network compression, offering a novel method that improves upon static intra-channel pruning techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of compressing CNNs by introducing dynamic structure pruning, which automatically optimizes pruning granularities for intra-channel pruning, achieving state-of-the-art performance with a 71.85% reduction in FLOPs for ResNet50 on ImageNet without accuracy loss.
Structure pruning is an effective method to compress and accelerate neural networks. While filter and channel pruning are preferable to other structure pruning methods in terms of realistic acceleration and hardware compatibility, pruning methods with a finer granularity, such as intra-channel pruning, are expected to be capable of yielding more compact and computationally efficient networks. Typical intra-channel pruning methods utilize a static and hand-crafted pruning granularity due to a large search space, which leaves room for improvement in their pruning performance. In this work, we introduce a novel structure pruning method, termed as dynamic structure pruning, to identify optimal pruning granularities for intra-channel pruning. In contrast to existing intra-channel pruning methods, the proposed method automatically optimizes dynamic pruning granularities in each layer while training deep neural networks. To achieve this, we propose a differentiable group learning method designed to efficiently learn a pruning granularity based on gradient-based learning of filter groups. The experimental results show that dynamic structure pruning achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance and better realistic acceleration on a GPU compared with channel pruning. In particular, it reduces the FLOPs of ResNet50 by 71.85% without accuracy degradation on the ImageNet dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/irishev/DSP.