The computational complexity of leveraging deep neural networks for extracting deep feature representations is a significant barrier to its widespread adoption, particularly for use in embedded devices. One particularly promising strategy to addressing the complexity issue is the notion of evolutionary synthesis of deep neural networks, which was demonstrated to successfully produce highly efficient deep neural networks while retaining modeling performance. Here, we further extend upon the evolutionary synthesis strategy for achieving efficient feature extraction via the introduction of a stress-induced evolutionary synthesis framework, where stress signals are imposed upon the synapses of a deep neural network during training to induce stress and steer the synthesis process towards the production of more efficient deep neural networks over successive generations and improved model fidelity at a greater efficiency. The proposed stress-induced evolutionary synthesis approach is evaluated on a variety of different deep neural network architectures (LeNet5, AlexNet, and YOLOv2) on different tasks (object classification and object detection) to synthesize efficient StressedNets over multiple generations. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework to synthesize StressedNets with significant improvement in network architecture efficiency (e.g., 40x for AlexNet and 33x for YOLOv2) and speed improvements (e.g., 5.5x inference speed-up for YOLOv2 on an Nvidia Tegra X1 mobile processor).
Variational learning and Bayesian algorithms @cite_39 @cite_19 are other techniques that have been proposed to formulate the model compression and network optimization. Ullrich @cite_39 took advantage of minimum description length in a variational learning framework for neural network compression. They enforced the sparsity and model compression via a prior distribution during the training time. Molchanov @cite_19 utilized a variational dropout approach to sparsify the neural networks. They applied an unbounded dropout technique leading to sparse neural networks.
@cite_19 @cite_39
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We explore a recently proposed Variational Dropout technique that provided an elegant Bayesian interpretation to Gaussian Dropout. We extend Variational Dropout to the case when dropout rates are unbounded, propose a way to reduce the variance of the gradient estimator and report first experimental results with individual dropout rates per weight. Interestingly, it leads to extremely sparse solutions both in fully-connected and convolutional layers. This effect is similar to automatic relevance determination effect in empirical Bayes but has a number of advantages. We reduce the number of parameters up to 280 times on LeNet architectures and up to 68 times on VGG-like networks with a negligible decrease of accuracy. The success of deep learning in numerous application domains created the desire to run and train them on mobile devices. This however, conflicts with their computationally, memory and energy intense nature, leading to a growing interest in compression. Recent work by (2016) propose a pipeline that involves retraining, pruning and quantization of neural network weights, obtaining state-of-the-art compression rates. In this paper, we show that competitive compression rates can be achieved by using a version of "soft weight-sharing" (Nowlan & Hinton, 1991). Our method achieves both quantization and pruning in one simple (re-)training procedure. This point of view also exposes the relation between compression and the minimum description length (MDL) principle.