To reduce the significant redundancy in deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), most existing methods prune neurons by only considering statistics of an individual layer or two consecutive layers (e.g., prune one layer to minimize the reconstruction error of the next layer), ignoring the effect of error propagation in deep networks. In contrast, we argue that it is essential to prune neurons in the entire neuron network jointly based on a unified goal: minimizing the reconstruction error of important responses in the "final response layer" (FRL), which is the secondto-last layer before classification, for a pruned network to retrain its predictive power. Specifically, we apply feature ranking techniques to measure the importance of each neuron in the FRL, and formulate network pruning as a binary integer optimization problem and derive a closed-form solution to it for pruning neurons in earlier layers. Based on our theoretical analysis, we propose the Neuron Importance Score Propagation (NISP) algorithm to propagate the importance scores of final responses to every neuron in the network. The CNN is pruned by removing neurons with least importance, and then fine-tuned to retain its predictive power. NISP is evaluated on several datasets with multiple CNN models and demonstrated to achieve significant acceleration and compression with negligible accuracy loss.

We propose an efficient and unified framework, namely ThiNet, to simultaneously accelerate and compress CNN models in both training and inference stages. We focus on the filter level pruning, i.e., the whole filter would be discarded if it is less important. Our method does not change the original network structure, thus it can be perfectly supported by any off-the-shelf deep learning libraries. We formally establish filter pruning as an optimization problem, and reveal that we need to prune filters based on statistics information computed from its next layer, not the current layer, which differentiates ThiNet from existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this strategy, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. We also show the performance of ThiNet on ILSVRC-12 benchmark. ThiNet achieves 3.31× FLOPs reduction and 16.63× compression on VGG-16, with only 0.52% top-5 accuracy drop. Similar experiments with ResNet-50 reveal that even for a compact network, ThiNet can also reduce more than half of the parameters and FLOPs, at the cost of roughly 1% top-5 accuracy drop. Moreover, the original VGG-16 model can be further pruned into a very small model with only 5.05MB model size, preserving AlexNet level accuracy but showing much stronger generalization ability.

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.

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

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.

The success of CNNs in various applications is accompanied by a significant increase in the computation and parameter storage costs. Recent efforts toward reducing these overheads involve pruning and compressing the weights of various layers without hurting original accuracy. However, magnitude-based pruning of weights reduces a significant number of parameters from the fully connected layers and may not adequately reduce the computation costs in the convolutional layers due to irregular sparsity in the pruned networks. We present an acceleration method for CNNs, where we prune filters from CNNs that are identified as having a small effect on the output accuracy. By removing whole filters in the network together with their connecting feature maps, the computation costs are reduced significantly. In contrast to pruning weights, this approach does not result in sparse connectivity patterns. Hence, it does not need the support of sparse convolution libraries and can work with existing efficient BLAS libraries for dense matrix multiplications. We show that even simple filter pruning techniques can reduce inference costs for VGG-16 by up to 34% and ResNet-110 by up to 38% on CIFAR10 while regaining close to the original accuracy by retraining the networks.

In this paper, we introduce a new channel pruning method to accelerate very deep convolutional neural networks. Given a trained CNN model, we propose an iterative two-step algorithm to effectively prune each layer, by a LASSO regression based channel selection and least square reconstruction. We further generalize this algorithm to multi-layer and multi-branch cases. Our method reduces the accumulated error and enhance the compatibility with various architectures. Our pruned VGG-16 achieves the state-of-the-art results by 5× speed-up along with only 0.3% increase of error. More importantly, our method is able to accelerate modern networks like ResNet, Xception and suffers only 1.4%, 1.0% accuracy loss under 2× speedup respectively, which is significant. Code has been made publicly available 1 .

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.

当前的深神经网络（DNN）被过度参数化，并在推断每个任务期间使用其大多数神经元连接。然而，人的大脑开发了针对不同任务的专门区域，并通过其神经元连接的一小部分进行推断。我们提出了一种迭代修剪策略，引入了一个简单的重要性评分度量度量，该指标可以停用不重要的连接，解决DNN中的过度参数化并调节射击模式。目的是找到仍然能够以可比精度解决给定任务的最小连接，即更简单的子网。我们在MNIST上实现了LENET体系结构的可比性能，并且与CIFAR-10/100和Tiny-ImageNet上的VGG和Resnet架构的最先进算法相比，参数压缩的性能明显更高。我们的方法对于考虑到ADAM和SGD的两个不同优化器也表现良好。该算法并非旨在在考虑当前的硬件和软件实现时最小化失败，尽管与最新技术相比，该算法的性能合理。

Neural network pruning offers a promising prospect to facilitate deploying deep neural networks on resourcelimited devices. However, existing methods are still challenged by the training inefficiency and labor cost in pruning designs, due to missing theoretical guidance of non-salient network components. In this paper, we propose a novel filter pruning method by exploring the High Rank of feature maps (HRank). Our HRank is inspired by the discovery that the average rank of multiple feature maps generated by a single filter is always the same, regardless of the number of image batches CNNs receive. Based on HRank, we develop a method that is mathematically formulated to prune filters with low-rank feature maps. The principle behind our pruning is that low-rank feature maps contain less information, and thus pruned results can be easily reproduced. Besides, we experimentally show that weights with high-rank feature maps contain more important information, such that even when a portion is not updated, very little damage would be done to the model performance. Without introducing any additional constraints, HRank leads to significant improvements over the state-of-the-arts in terms of FLOPs and parameters reduction, with similar accuracies. For example, with ResNet-110, we achieve a 58.2%-FLOPs reduction by removing 59.2% of the parameters, with only a small loss of 0.14% in top-1 accuracy on CIFAR-10. With Res-50, we achieve a 43.8%-FLOPs reduction by removing 36.7% of the parameters, with only a loss of 1.17% in the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. The codes can be available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/HRank.

过滤器修剪方法通过去除选定的过滤器来引入结构稀疏性，因此对于降低复杂性特别有效。先前的作品从验证较小规范的过滤器的角度从经验修剪网络中造成了较小的最终结果贡献。但是，此类标准已被证明对过滤器的分布敏感，并且由于修剪后的容量差距是固定的，因此准确性可能很难恢复。在本文中，我们提出了一种称为渐近软簇修剪（ASCP）的新型过滤器修剪方法，以根据过滤器的相似性来识别网络的冗余。首先通过聚类来区分来自参数过度的网络的每个过滤器，然后重建以手动将冗余引入其中。提出了一些聚类指南，以更好地保留特征提取能力。重建后，允许更新过滤器，以消除错误选择的效果。此外，还采用了各种修剪率的衰减策略来稳定修剪过程并改善最终性能。通过逐渐在每个群集中生成更相同的过滤器，ASCP可以通过通道添加操作将其删除，几乎没有准确性下降。 CIFAR-10和Imagenet数据集的广泛实验表明，与许多最新算法相比，我们的方法可以取得竞争性结果。

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。

虽然残留连接使训练非常深的神经网络，但由于其多分支拓扑而​​导致在线推断不友好。这鼓励许多研究人员在推动时没有残留连接的情况下设计DNN。例如，repvgg在部署时将多分支拓扑重新参数化为vgg型（单分支）模型，当网络相对较浅时显示出具有很大的性能。但是，RepVGG不能等效地将Reset转换为VGG，因为重新参数化方法只能应用于线性块，并且必须将非线性层（Relu）放在残余连接之外，这导致了有限的表示能力，特别是更深入网络。在本文中，我们的目标是通过在Resblock上的保留和合并（RM）操作等效地纠正此问题，并提出删除Vanilla Reset中的残留连接。具体地，RM操作允许输入特征映射通过块，同时保留其信息，并在每个块的末尾合并所有信息，这可以去除残差而不改变原始输出。作为一个插件方法，RM操作基本上有三个优点：1）其实现使其实现高比率网络修剪。 2）它有助于打破RepVGG的深度限制。 3）与Reset和RepVGG相比，它导致更好的精度速度折衷网络（RMNet）。我们相信RM操作的意识形态可以激发对未来社区的模型设计的许多见解。代码可用：https://github.com/fxmeng/rmnet。

卷积神经网络（CNNS）在许多实际应用中成功了。但是，它们的高计算和存储要求通常使它们难以在资源受限的设备上部署。为了解决这个问题，已经提出了许多修剪算法用于CNN，但大多数人不能将CNNS提交给合理的水平。在本文中，我们提出了一种基于递归最小二乘（RLS）优化的训练和修剪CNN的新颖算法。在为某些时期培训CNN之后，我们的算法组合了逆输入自相关矩阵和权重矩阵，以按层评估和修剪不重要的输入通道或节点层。然后，我们的算法将继续培训修剪的网络，并且在修剪的网络恢复旧网络的完整性能之前，不会进行下一次修剪。此外，对于CNN，所提出的算法可用于前馈神经网络（FNN）。在MNIST，CIFAR-10和SVHN数据集上的三个实验表明，我们的算法可以实现更合理的修剪，并且具有比其他四个流行的修剪算法更高的学习效率。

由于存储器和计算资源有限，部署在移动设备上的卷积神经网络（CNNS）是困难的。我们的目标是通过利用特征图中的冗余来设计包括CPU和GPU的异构设备的高效神经网络，这很少在神经结构设计中进行了研究。对于类似CPU的设备，我们提出了一种新颖的CPU高效的Ghost（C-Ghost）模块，以生成从廉价操作的更多特征映射。基于一组内在的特征映射，我们使用廉价的成本应用一系列线性变换，以生成许多幽灵特征图，可以完全揭示内在特征的信息。所提出的C-Ghost模块可以作为即插即用组件，以升级现有的卷积神经网络。 C-Ghost瓶颈旨在堆叠C-Ghost模块，然后可以轻松建立轻量级的C-Ghostnet。我们进一步考虑GPU设备的有效网络。在建筑阶段的情况下，不涉及太多的GPU效率（例如，深度明智的卷积），我们建议利用阶段明智的特征冗余来制定GPU高效的幽灵（G-GHOST）阶段结构。舞台中的特征被分成两个部分，其中使用具有较少输出通道的原始块处理第一部分，用于生成内在特征，另一个通过利用阶段明智的冗余来生成廉价的操作。在基准测试上进行的实验证明了所提出的C-Ghost模块和G-Ghost阶段的有效性。 C-Ghostnet和G-Ghostnet分别可以分别实现CPU和GPU的准确性和延迟的最佳权衡。代码可在https://github.com/huawei-noah/cv-backbones获得。

神经网络修剪具有显着性能，可以降低深网络模型的复杂性。最近的网络修剪方法通常集中在网络中删除不重要或冗余过滤器。在本文中，通过探索特征图之间的相似性，我们提出了一种新颖的滤波器修剪方法，中央滤波器（CF），这表明在适当的调整之后滤波器大致等于一组其他滤波器。我们的方法基于发现特征贴图之间的平均相似性的发现，而不管输入图像的数量如何，都会很少变化。基于此发现，我们在特征映射上建立相似性图，并计算每个节点的近密中心以选择中央滤波器。此外，我们设计一种方法，可以在与中央滤波器对应的下一层中直接调整权重，有效地最小化由修剪引起的误差。通过对各种基准网络和数据集的实验，CF产生最先进的性能。例如，对于Reset-56，CF通过去除47.1％的参数来减少约39.7％的絮凝物，甚至在CiFar-10上的精度改善0.33％。通过Googlenet，CF通过去除55.6％的参数来减少大约63.2％的拖鞋，仅在CIFAR-10上的前1个精度下降0.35％的损失。通过resnet-50，CF通过去除36.9％的参数减少约47.9％的拖鞋，仅在Imagenet上的前1个精度下降1.07％。该代码可以在https://github.com/8ubpshlr23/centrter上获得。

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 DNN's evaluation. Experimental results show that SSL achieves on average 5.1× and 3.1× 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 ∼ 1%. Our source code can be found at https://github.com/wenwei202/caffe/tree/scnn

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.

Deploying convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on embedded devices is difficult due to the limited memory and computation resources. The redundancy in feature maps is an important characteristic of those successful CNNs, but has rarely been investigated in neural architecture design. This paper proposes a novel Ghost module to generate more feature maps from cheap operations. Based on a set of intrinsic feature maps, we apply a series of linear transformations with cheap cost to generate many ghost feature maps that could fully reveal information underlying intrinsic features. The proposed Ghost module can be taken as a plug-and-play component to upgrade existing convolutional neural networks. Ghost bottlenecks are designed to stack Ghost modules, and then the lightweight Ghost-Net can be easily established. Experiments conducted on benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed Ghost module is an impressive alternative of convolution layers in baseline models, and our GhostNet can achieve higher recognition performance (e.g. 75.7% top-1 accuracy) than MobileNetV3 with similar computational cost on the ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 classification dataset. Code is available at https: //github.com/huawei-noah/ghostnet.

我们为深神经网络提出了一种新的全球压缩框架，它自动分析每个层以识别最佳的每个层压缩比，同时实现所需的整体压缩。我们的算法通过将其通道切入多个组并通过低秩分解来分解每个组来铰接压缩每个卷积（或完全连接）层的想法。在我们的算法的核心处于从Eckart Young MiRSKY定理中推导了层面错误界限的推导。然后，我们利用这些界限将压缩问题框架作为优化问题，我们希望最小化层次的最大压缩误差并提出朝向解决方案的有效算法。我们的实验表明，我们的方法优于各种网络和数据集的现有低级压缩方法。我们认为，我们的结果为未来的全球性能大小的研究开辟了新的途径，即现代神经网络的全球性能大小。我们的代码可在https://github.com/lucaslie/torchprune获得。