Structured weight pruning is a representative model compression technique of DNNs to reduce the storage and computation requirements and accelerate inference. An automatic hyperparameter determination process is necessary due to the large number of flexible hyperparameters. This work proposes AutoSlim, an automatic structured pruning framework with the following key performance improvements: (i) effectively incorporate the combination of structured pruning schemes in the automatic process; (ii) adopt the state-of-art ADMM-based structured weight pruning as the core algorithm, and propose an innovative additional purification step for further weight reduction without accuracy loss; and (iii) develop effective heuristic search method enhanced by experience-based guided search, replacing the prior deep reinforcement learning technique which has underlying incompatibility with the target pruning problem. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that AutoSlim is the key to achieve ultra-high pruning rates on the number of weights and FLOPs that cannot be achieved before. As an example, AutoSlim outperforms the prior work on automatic model compression by up to 33 @math in pruning rate under the same accuracy. We release all models of this work at anonymous link: this http URL.
Figure illustrates three structured pruning schemes on the CONV layers of DNN: , , and (a.k.a. ), removing whole filter(s), channel(s), and the same location in each filter in each layer. CONV operations in DNNs are commonly transformed to matrix multiplications by converting weight tensors and feature map tensors to matrices @cite_13 , named (GEMM). The key advantage of structured pruning is that a full matrix will be maintained in GEMM with dimensionality reduction, without the need of indices, thereby facilitating hardware implementations.
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High demand for computation resources severely hinders deployment of large-scale Deep Neural Networks (DNN) in resource constrained devices. In this work, we propose a Structured Sparsity Learning (SSL) method to regularize the structures (i.e., filters, channels, filter shapes, and layer depth) of DNNs. SSL can: (1) learn a compact structure from a bigger DNN to reduce computation cost; (2) obtain a hardware-friendly structured sparsity of DNN to efficiently accelerate the DNNs evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1x and 3.1x speedups of convolutional layer computation of AlexNet against CPU and GPU, respectively, with off-the-shelf libraries. These speedups are about twice speedups of non-structured sparsity; (3) regularize the DNN structure to improve classification accuracy. The results show that for CIFAR-10, regularization on layer depth can reduce 20 layers of a Deep Residual Network (ResNet) to 18 layers while improve the accuracy from 91.25 to 92.60 , which is still slightly higher than that of original ResNet with 32 layers. For AlexNet, structure regularization by SSL also reduces the error by around 1 . Open source code is in this https URL