Modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are complex, encompassing millions of parameters. Their deployment exerts computational, storage and energy demands, particularly on embedded platforms. Existing approaches to prune or sparsify CNNs require retraining to maintain inference accuracy. Such retraining is not feasible in some contexts. In this paper, we explore the sparsification of CNNs by proposing three model-independent methods. Our methods are applied on-the-fly and require no retraining. We show that the state-of-the-art models' weights can be reduced by up to 73 (compression factor of 3.7x) without incurring more than 5 loss in Top-5 accuracy. Additional fine-tuning gains only 8 in sparsity, which indicates that our fast on-the-fly methods are effective.
@cite_28 proposed a try-and-learn algorithm for pruning redundant filters in CNNs. They use a reward function to aggressively prune with minimal loss of accuracy; however, their method requires retraining as well as user input. Earlier,
@cite_28
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Many state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms use large scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) as basic building blocks. These CNNs are known for their huge number of parameters, high redundancy in weights, and tremendous computing resource consumptions. This paper presents a learning algorithm to simplify and speed up these CNNs. Specifically, we introduce a “try-and-learn” algorithm to train pruning agents that remove unnecessary CNN filters in a data-driven way. With the help of a novel reward function, our agents removes a significant number of filters in CNNs while maintaining performance at a desired level. Moreover, this method provides an easy control of the tradeoff between network performance and its scale. Performance of our algorithm is validated with comprehensive pruning experiments on several popular CNNs for visual recognition and semantic segmentation tasks.