由于稀疏神经网络通常包含许多零权重，因此可以在不降低网络性能的情况下潜在地消除这些不必要的网络连接。因此，设计良好的稀疏神经网络具有显着降低拖鞋和计算资源的潜力。在这项工作中，我们提出了一种新的自动修剪方法 - 稀疏连接学习（SCL）。具体地，重量被重新参数化为可培训权重变量和二进制掩模的元素方向乘法。因此，由二进制掩模完全描述网络连接，其由单位步进函数调制。理论上，从理论上证明了使用直通估计器（STE）进行网络修剪的基本原理。这一原则是STE的代理梯度应该是积极的，确保掩模变量在其最小值处收敛。在找到泄漏的Relu后，SoftPlus和Identity Stes可以满足这个原理，我们建议采用SCL的身份STE以进行离散面膜松弛。我们发现不同特征的面具梯度非常不平衡，因此，我们建议将每个特征的掩模梯度标准化以优化掩码变量训练。为了自动训练稀疏掩码，我们将网络连接总数作为我们的客观函数中的正则化术语。由于SCL不需要由网络层设计人员定义的修剪标准或超级参数，因此在更大的假设空间中探讨了网络，以实现最佳性能的优化稀疏连接。 SCL克服了现有自动修剪方法的局限性。实验结果表明，SCL可以自动学习并选择各种基线网络结构的重要网络连接。 SCL培训的深度学习模型以稀疏性，精度和减少脚波特的SOTA人类设计和自动修剪方法训练。

稀疏培训是一种自然的想法，可以加速深度神经网络的训练速度，并节省内存使用，特别是因为大型现代神经网络被显着过度参数化。然而，大多数现有方法在实践中无法实现这一目标，因为先前方法采用的基于链规则的梯度（W.R.T.结构参数）估计。至少在向后传播步骤中至少需要密集的计算。本文通过提出具有完全稀疏的前后通行证的有效稀疏训练方法来解决这个问题。我们首先在全球稀疏限制下将培训过程制定为连续最小化问题。然后，我们将优化过程分为两个步骤，对应于权重更新和结构参数更新。对于前一步，我们使用传统的链规则，这可以通过利用稀疏结构来稀疏。对于后一步，而不是使用基于链规则的梯度估计器，如现有方法中，我们提出了一个方差减少的策略梯度估计器，这只需要两个向前通过而不向后传播，从而实现完全稀疏的训练。我们证明了我们渐变估计器的差异是界定的。对现实世界数据集的广泛实验结果表明，与以前的方法相比，我们的算法在加速训练过程中更有效，速度快到速度更快。

While machine learning is traditionally a resource intensive task, embedded systems, autonomous navigation, and the vision of the Internet of Things fuel the interest in resource-efficient approaches. These approaches aim for a carefully chosen trade-off between performance and resource consumption in terms of computation and energy. The development of such approaches is among the major challenges in current machine learning research and key to ensure a smooth transition of machine learning technology from a scientific environment with virtually unlimited computing resources into everyday's applications. In this article, we provide an overview of the current state of the art of machine learning techniques facilitating these real-world requirements. In particular, we focus on deep neural networks (DNNs), the predominant machine learning models of the past decade. We give a comprehensive overview of the vast literature that can be mainly split into three non-mutually exclusive categories: (i) quantized neural networks, (ii) network pruning, and (iii) structural efficiency. These techniques can be applied during training or as post-processing, and they are widely used to reduce the computational demands in terms of memory footprint, inference speed, and energy efficiency. We also briefly discuss different concepts of embedded hardware for DNNs and their compatibility with machine learning techniques as well as potential for energy and latency reduction. We substantiate our discussion with experiments on well-known benchmark datasets using compression techniques (quantization, pruning) for a set of resource-constrained embedded systems, such as CPUs, GPUs and FPGAs. The obtained results highlight the difficulty of finding good trade-offs between resource efficiency and predictive performance.

The deployment of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) in many real world applications is largely hindered by their high computational cost. In this paper, we propose a novel learning scheme for CNNs to simultaneously 1) reduce the model size; 2) decrease the run-time memory footprint; and 3) lower the number of computing operations, without compromising accuracy. This is achieved by enforcing channel-level sparsity in the network in a simple but effective way. Different from many existing approaches, the proposed method directly applies to modern CNN architectures, introduces minimum overhead to the training process, and requires no special software/hardware accelerators for the resulting models. We call our approach network slimming, which takes wide and large networks as input models, but during training insignificant channels are automatically identified and pruned afterwards, yielding thin and compact models with comparable accuracy. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with several state-of-the-art CNN models, including VGGNet, ResNet and DenseNet, on various image classification datasets. For VGGNet, a multi-pass version of network slimming gives a 20× reduction in model size and a 5× reduction in computing operations.

Many applications require sparse neural networks due to space or inference time restrictions. There is a large body of work on training dense networks to yield sparse networks for inference, but this limits the size of the largest trainable sparse model to that of the largest trainable dense model. In this paper we introduce a method to train sparse neural networks with a fixed parameter count and a fixed computational cost throughout training, without sacrificing accuracy relative to existing dense-tosparse training methods. Our method updates the topology of the sparse network during training by using parameter magnitudes and infrequent gradient calculations. We show that this approach requires fewer floating-point operations (FLOPs) to achieve a given level of accuracy compared to prior techniques. We demonstrate state-of-the-art sparse training results on a variety of networks and datasets, including ResNet-50, MobileNets on Imagenet-2012, and RNNs on WikiText-103. Finally, we provide some insights into why allowing the topology to change during the optimization can overcome local minima encountered when the topology remains static * .

Low-rankness plays an important role in traditional machine learning, but is not so popular in deep learning. Most previous low-rank network compression methods compress the networks by approximating pre-trained models and re-training. However, the optimal solution in the Euclidean space may be quite different from the one in the low-rank manifold. A well-pre-trained model is not a good initialization for the model with low-rank constraints. Thus, the performance of a low-rank compressed network degrades significantly. Compared to other network compression methods such as pruning, low-rank methods attracts less attention in recent years. In this paper, we devise a new training method, low-rank projection with energy transfer (LRPET), that trains low-rank compressed networks from scratch and achieves competitive performance. First, we propose to alternately perform stochastic gradient descent training and projection onto the low-rank manifold. Compared to re-training on the compact model, this enables full utilization of model capacity since solution space is relaxed back to Euclidean space after projection. Second, the matrix energy (the sum of squares of singular values) reduction caused by projection is compensated by energy transfer. We uniformly transfer the energy of the pruned singular values to the remaining ones. We theoretically show that energy transfer eases the trend of gradient vanishing caused by projection. Third, we propose batch normalization (BN) rectification to cut off its effect on the optimal low-rank approximation of the weight matrix, which further improves the performance. Comprehensive experiments on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet have justified that our method is superior to other low-rank compression methods and also outperforms recent state-of-the-art pruning methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/BZQLin/LRPET.

网络压缩对于使深网的效率更高，更快且可推广到低端硬件至关重要。当前的网络压缩方法有两个开放问题：首先，缺乏理论框架来估计最大压缩率；其次，有些层可能会过多地进行，从而导致网络性能大幅下降。为了解决这两个问题，这项研究提出了一种基于梯度矩阵分析方法，以估计最大网络冗余。在最大速率的指导下，开发了一种新颖而有效的层次网络修剪算法，以最大程度地凝结神经元网络结构而无需牺牲网络性能。进行实质性实验以证明新方法修剪几个高级卷积神经网络（CNN）体系结构的功效。与现有的修剪方法相比，拟议的修剪算法实现了最先进的性能。与其他方法相比，在相同或相似的压缩比下，新方法提供了最高的网络预测准确性。

Network pruning is widely used for reducing the heavy inference cost of deep models in low-resource settings. A typical pruning algorithm is a three-stage pipeline, i.e., training (a large model), pruning and fine-tuning. During pruning, according to a certain criterion, redundant weights are pruned and important weights are kept to best preserve the accuracy. In this work, we make several surprising observations which contradict common beliefs. For all state-of-the-art structured pruning algorithms we examined, fine-tuning a pruned model only gives comparable or worse performance than training that model with randomly initialized weights. For pruning algorithms which assume a predefined target network architecture, one can get rid of the full pipeline and directly train the target network from scratch. Our observations are consistent for multiple network architectures, datasets, and tasks, which imply that: 1) training a large, over-parameterized model is often not necessary to obtain an efficient final model, 2) learned "important" weights of the large model are typically not useful for the small pruned model, 3) the pruned architecture itself, rather than a set of inherited "important" weights, is more crucial to the efficiency in the final model, which suggests that in some cases pruning can be useful as an architecture search paradigm. Our results suggest the need for more careful baseline evaluations in future research on structured pruning methods. We also compare with the "Lottery Ticket Hypothesis" (Frankle & Carbin, 2019), and find that with optimal learning rate, the "winning ticket" initialization as used in Frankle & Carbin (2019) does not bring improvement over random initialization. * Equal contribution. † Work done while visiting UC Berkeley.

Pruning large neural networks while maintaining their performance is often desirable due to the reduced space and time complexity. In existing methods, pruning is done within an iterative optimization procedure with either heuristically designed pruning schedules or additional hyperparameters, undermining their utility. In this work, we present a new approach that prunes a given network once at initialization prior to training. To achieve this, we introduce a saliency criterion based on connection sensitivity that identifies structurally important connections in the network for the given task. This eliminates the need for both pretraining and the complex pruning schedule while making it robust to architecture variations. After pruning, the sparse network is trained in the standard way. Our method obtains extremely sparse networks with virtually the same accuracy as the reference network on the MNIST, CIFAR-10, and Tiny-ImageNet classification tasks and is broadly applicable to various architectures including convolutional, residual and recurrent networks. Unlike existing methods, our approach enables us to demonstrate that the retained connections are indeed relevant to the given task.

深度学习技术在各种任务中都表现出了出色的有效性，并且深度学习具有推进多种应用程序（包括在边缘计算中）的潜力，其中将深层模型部署在边缘设备上，以实现即时的数据处理和响应。一个关键的挑战是，虽然深层模型的应用通常会产生大量的内存和计算成本，但Edge设备通常只提供非常有限的存储和计算功能，这些功能可能会在各个设备之间差异很大。这些特征使得难以构建深度学习解决方案，以释放边缘设备的潜力，同时遵守其约束。应对这一挑战的一种有希望的方法是自动化有效的深度学习模型的设计，这些模型轻巧，仅需少量存储，并且仅产生低计算开销。该调查提供了针对边缘计算的深度学习模型设计自动化技术的全面覆盖。它提供了关键指标的概述和比较，这些指标通常用于量化模型在有效性，轻度和计算成本方面的水平。然后，该调查涵盖了深层设计自动化技术的三类最新技术：自动化神经体系结构搜索，自动化模型压缩以及联合自动化设计和压缩。最后，调查涵盖了未来研究的开放问题和方向。

修剪深度神经网络的现有方法专注于去除训练有素的网络的不必要参数，然后微调模型，找到恢复训练模型的初始性能的良好解决方案。与其他作品不同，我们的方法特别注意通过修剪神经元的压缩模型和推理计算时间的解决方案的质量。通过探索Hessian的光谱半径，所提出的算法通过探索Hessian的光谱半径来指示压缩模型的参数，这导致了更好地推广了未经看涨的数据。此外，该方法不适用于预先训练的网络，并同时执行训练和修剪。我们的结果表明，它改善了神经元压缩的最先进的结果。该方法能够在不同神经网络模型上实现具有小精度下降的非常小的网络。

训练有素的神经网络的性能至关重要。加上深度学习模型的不断增长的规模，这种观察激发了对学习稀疏模型的广泛研究。在这项工作中，我们专注于控制稀疏学习时的稀疏水平的任务。基于稀疏性惩罚的现有方法涉及对罚款因素的昂贵反复试验调整，因此缺乏直接控制所得模型的稀疏性。作为响应，我们采用了一个约束的公式：使用Louizos等人提出的栅极机制。 （2018年），我们制定了一个受约束的优化问题，其中稀疏以训练目标和所需的稀疏目标以端到端的方式指导。使用WIDERESNET和RESNET {18，50}模型进行了CIFAR-10/100，Tinyimagenet和ImageNet的实验验证了我们的提案的有效性，并证明我们可以可靠地实现预定的稀疏目标，而不会损害预测性能。

We propose a new formulation for pruning convolutional kernels in neural networks to enable efficient inference. We interleave greedy criteria-based pruning with finetuning by backpropagation-a computationally efficient procedure that maintains good generalization in the pruned network. We propose a new criterion based on Taylor expansion that approximates the change in the cost function induced by pruning network parameters. We focus on transfer learning, where large pretrained networks are adapted to specialized tasks. The proposed criterion demonstrates superior performance compared to other criteria, e.g. the norm of kernel weights or feature map activation, for pruning large CNNs after adaptation to fine-grained classification tasks (Birds-200 and Flowers-102) relaying only on the first order gradient information. We also show that pruning can lead to more than 10× theoretical reduction in adapted 3D-convolutional filters with a small drop in accuracy in a recurrent gesture classifier. Finally, we show results for the largescale ImageNet dataset to emphasize the flexibility of our approach.

This paper proposed a Soft Filter Pruning (SFP) method to accelerate the inference procedure of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, the proposed SFP enables the pruned filters to be updated when training the model after pruning. SFP has two advantages over previous works: (1) Larger model capacity. Updating previously pruned filters provides our approach with larger optimization space than fixing the filters to zero. Therefore, the network trained by our method has a larger model capacity to learn from the training data. (2) Less dependence on the pretrained model. Large capacity enables SFP to train from scratch and prune the model simultaneously. In contrast, previous filter pruning methods should be conducted on the basis of the pre-trained model to guarantee their performance. Empirically, SFP from scratch outperforms the previous filter pruning methods. Moreover, our approach has been demonstrated effective for many advanced CNN architectures. Notably, on ILSCRC-2012, SFP reduces more than 42% FLOPs on ResNet-101 with even 0.2% top-5 accuracy improvement, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/he-y/softfilter-pruning

动态模型修剪是最近的方向，其允许不同的子网络中的部署过程中每个输入采样的推断。然而，当前的动态方法依赖于学习的连续通道通过诱导稀疏性损失通过正则化门控。这一提法介绍了平衡不同损失的复杂性（如任务的损失，正规化损失）。此外，基于正则化方法缺乏透明的折衷选择超参数，实现计算的预算。我们的贡献是双重的：1）分离任务和修剪培训。 2）简单的超参数选择，使训练前FLOPS减少估计。在神经科学的赫布理论的启发：“神经元一起火一起丝”，我们提出来预测基于其上一层的活化层口罩方法K过滤器。我们提出的问题，因为自监督二元分类问题。每个掩模预测模块被训练以预测，如果对数似然在当前层中的每个过滤器属于前k激活的过滤器。值k被动态地估计基于使用热图的质量的新颖标准每个输入。我们发现在几个神经结构，如VGG，RESNET和MobileNet上CIFAR和ImageNet数据集实验。在CIFAR，我们得出了类似的精度SOTA方法有15％和24％以上FLOPS减少。同样，在ImageNet，我们达到的精度低下降高达13％的改善FLOPS减少。

We propose a simultaneous learning and pruning algorithm capable of identifying and eliminating irrelevant structures in a neural network during the early stages of training. Thus, the computational cost of subsequent training iterations, besides that of inference, is considerably reduced. Our method, based on variational inference principles using Gaussian scale mixture priors on neural network weights, learns the variational posterior distribution of Bernoulli random variables multiplying the units/filters similarly to adaptive dropout. Our algorithm, ensures that the Bernoulli parameters practically converge to either 0 or 1, establishing a deterministic final network. We analytically derive a novel hyper-prior distribution over the prior parameters that is crucial for their optimal selection and leads to consistent pruning levels and prediction accuracy regardless of weight initialization or the size of the starting network. We prove the convergence properties of our algorithm establishing theoretical and practical pruning conditions. We evaluate the proposed algorithm on the MNIST and CIFAR-10 data sets and the commonly used fully connected and convolutional LeNet and VGG16 architectures. The simulations show that our method achieves pruning levels on par with state-of the-art methods for structured pruning, while maintaining better test-accuracy and more importantly in a manner robust with respect to network initialization and initial size.

信道修剪中最有效的方法之一是根据每个神经元的重要性来修剪。然而，测量每个神经元的重要性是NP难题。以前的作品通过考虑单层或多个连续的神经元层的统计来修剪。这些作品无法消除不同数据对重建错误模型的影响，并且目前没有工作证明参数的绝对值可以直接用作判断权重的重要性的基础。一种更合理的方法是消除准确测量影响力的批量数据之间的差异。在本文中，我们建议使用集合学习来培训不同批量数据的模型，并使用影响功能（来自强大的统计数据的经典技术）来学习算法跟踪模型的预测并返回其训练参数梯度，使其返回其训练参数梯度，使其返回其培训参数梯度，使其返回其培训参数梯度，使其返回其培训参数梯度，使其返回其训练参数梯度我们可以在预测过程中确定我们称之为“影响”的每个参数的责任。此外，我们理论上证明了深度网络的后传播是权重的影响函数的一阶泰勒近似。我们执行广泛的实验，以证明使用集合学习的思想基于影响功能的修剪将比仅关注误差重建更有效。 CIFAR的实验表明，影响修剪达到最先进的结果。

过滤器修剪的目标是搜索不重要的过滤器以删除以便使卷积神经网络（CNNS）有效而不牺牲过程中的性能。挑战在于找到可以帮助确定每个过滤器关于神经网络的最终输出的重要或相关的信息的信息。在这项工作中，我们分享了我们的观察说，预先训练的CNN的批量标准化（BN）参数可用于估计激活输出的特征分布，而无需处理训练数据。在观察时，我们通过基于预先训练的CNN的BN参数评估每个滤波器的重要性来提出简单而有效的滤波修剪方法。 CiFar-10和Imagenet的实验结果表明，该方法可以在准确性下降和计算复杂性的计算复杂性和降低的折衷方面具有和不进行微调的卓越性能。

深度神经网络（DNN）在解决许多真实问题方面都有效。较大的DNN模型通常表现出更好的质量（例如，精度，精度），但它们的过度计算会导致长期推理时间。模型稀疏可以降低计算和内存成本，同时保持模型质量。大多数现有的稀疏算法是单向移除的重量，而其他人则随机或贪婪地探索每层进行修剪的小权重子集。这些算法的局限性降低了可实现的稀疏性水平。此外，许多算法仍然需要预先训练的密集模型，因此遭受大的内存占地面积。在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的预定生长和修剪（间隙）方法，而无需预先培训密集模型。它通过反复生长一个层次的层来解决以前的作品的缺点，然后在一些训练后修剪回到稀疏。实验表明，使用所提出的方法修剪模型匹配或击败高度优化的密集模型的质量，在各种任务中以80％的稀疏度，例如图像分类，客观检测，3D对象分段和翻译。它们还优于模型稀疏的其他最先进的（SOTA）方法。作为一个例子，通过间隙获得的90％不均匀的稀疏resnet-50模型在想象中实现了77.9％的前1个精度，提高了先前的SOTA结果1.5％。所有代码将公开发布。

在过去几年中，神经网络的性能在越来越多的浮点操作（拖鞋）的成本上显着提高。但是，当计算资源有限时，更多的拖鞋可能是一个问题。作为解决这个问题的尝试，修剪过滤器是一种常见的解决方案，但大多数现有的修剪方法不有效地保持模型精度，因此需要大量的芬降时期。在本文中，我们提出了一种自动修剪方法，该方法学习保存的神经元以保持模型精度，同时将絮凝到预定目标。为了完成这项任务，我们介绍了一种可训练的瓶颈，只需要一个单一的单一时期，只需要一个数据集的25.6％（Cifar-10）或7.49％（ILSVRC2012）来了解哪些过滤器。在各种架构和数据集上的实验表明，该方法不仅可以在修剪后保持精度，而且在FineTuning之后也优越现有方法。我们在Reset-50上达到了52.00％的拖鞋，在ILSVRC2012上的灌溉后的前1个精度为47.51％，最先进的（SOTA）精度为76.63％。代码可用（链接匿名审核）。