Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN's) are restricted by their massive computation and high storage. Parameter pruning is a promising approach for CNN compression and acceleration, which aims at eliminating redundant model parameters with tolerable performance loss. Despite its effectiveness, existing regularization-based parameter pruning methods usually assign a fixed regularization parameter to all weights, which neglects the fact that different weights may have different importance to CNN. To solve this problem, we propose a theoretically sound regularization-based pruning method to incrementally assign different regularization parameters to different weights based on their importance to the network. On AlexNet and VGG-16, our method can achieve 4x theoretical speedup with similar accuracies compared with the baselines. For ResNet-50, the proposed method also achieves 2x acceleration and only suffers 0.1 top-5 accuracy loss.
 Deep neural networks currently demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in several domains. At the same time, models of this class are very demanding in terms of computational resources. In particular, a large amount of memory is required by commonly used fully-connected layers, making it hard to use the models on low-end devices and stopping the further increase of the model size. In this paper we convert the dense weight matrices of the fully-connected layers to the Tensor Train format such that the number of parameters is reduced by a huge factor and at the same time the expressive power of the layer is preserved. In particular, for the Very Deep VGG networks we report the compression factor of the dense weight matrix of a fully-connected layer up to 200000 times leading to the compression factor of the whole network up to 7 times. We present techniques for speeding up the test-time evaluation of large convolutional networks, designed for object recognition tasks. These models deliver impressive accuracy, but each image evaluation requires millions of floating point operations, making their deployment on smartphones and Internet-scale clusters problematic. The computation is dominated by the convolution operations in the lower layers of the model. We exploit the redundancy present within the convolutional filters to derive approximations that significantly reduce the required computation. Using large state-of-the-art models, we demonstrate speedups of convolutional layers on both CPU and GPU by a factor of 2 x, while keeping the accuracy within 1 of the original model. We have witnessed rapid evolution of deep neural network architecture design in the past years. These latest progresses greatly facilitate the developments in various areas such as computer vision, natural language processing, etc. However, along with the extraordinary performance, these state-of-the-art models also bring in expensive computational cost. Directly deploying these models into applications with real-time requirement is still infeasible. Recently, . have shown that the dark knowledge within a powerful teacher model can significantly help the training of a smaller and faster student network. These knowledge are vastly beneficial to improve the generalization ability of the student model. Inspired by their work, we introduce a new type of knowledge -- cross sample similarities for model compression and acceleration. This knowledge can be naturally derived from deep metric learning model. To transfer them, we bring the learning to rank technique into deep metric learning formulation. We test our proposed DarkRank on the pedestrian re-identification task. The results are quite encouraging. Our DarkRank can improve over the baseline method by a large margin. Moreover, it is fully compatible with other existing methods. When combined, the performance can be further boosted.