最近的几项著作从经验上发现，鉴定学习率对于神经网络结构修剪的最终表现至关重要。进一步的研究发现，网络训练性通过修剪答案而破坏，因此呼吁迫切需要在填充之前恢复训练性。现有的尝试建议利用重量正交化以实现动态等轴测图，以提高训练性。但是，它们仅适用于线性MLP网络。如何开发一种维护或恢复可训练性并且可扩展到现代深网的过滤器修剪方法仍然难以捉摸。在本文中，我们提出了维护修剪（TPP）的训练性，这是一种基于正则化的结构化修剪方法，可以有效地维持稀疏期间的训练性。具体而言，TPP将卷积内核的革兰氏矩阵正规化，以从保存的过滤器中解除修剪过滤器。除了卷积层外，我们还建议将BN参数正规化，以更好地保留训练性。从经验上讲，TPP可以与线性MLP网络上的基地真相动力学恢复方法竞争。在非线性网络（RESNET56/VGG19，CIFAR数据集）上，它的表现优于其他对应解决方案。此外，与许多表现最好的滤镜修剪方法相比，TPP还可以在ImageNet上与现代深层网络（RESENET）有效地工作，从而提供了令人鼓舞的性能。据我们所知，这是第一种在大规模深度神经网络修剪过程中有效维持训练性的第一种方法。

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。

The mainstream approach for filter pruning is usually either to force a hard-coded importance estimation upon a computation-heavy pretrained model to select "important" filters, or to impose a hyperparameter-sensitive sparse constraint on the loss objective to regularize the network training. In this paper, we present a novel filter pruning method, dubbed dynamic-coded filter fusion (DCFF), to derive compact CNNs in a computation-economical and regularization-free manner for efficient image classification. Each filter in our DCFF is firstly given an inter-similarity distribution with a temperature parameter as a filter proxy, on top of which, a fresh Kullback-Leibler divergence based dynamic-coded criterion is proposed to evaluate the filter importance. In contrast to simply keeping high-score filters in other methods, we propose the concept of filter fusion, i.e., the weighted averages using the assigned proxies, as our preserved filters. We obtain a one-hot inter-similarity distribution as the temperature parameter approaches infinity. Thus, the relative importance of each filter can vary along with the training of the compact CNN, leading to dynamically changeable fused filters without both the dependency on the pretrained model and the introduction of sparse constraints. Extensive experiments on classification benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our DCFF over the compared counterparts. For example, our DCFF derives a compact VGGNet-16 with only 72.77M FLOPs and 1.06M parameters while reaching top-1 accuracy of 93.47% on CIFAR-10. A compact ResNet-50 is obtained with 63.8% FLOPs and 58.6% parameter reductions, retaining 75.60% top-1 accuracy on ILSVRC-2012. Our code, narrower models and training logs are available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/DCFF.

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.

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

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）。

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。

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.

Structural pruning of neural network parameters reduces computation, energy, and memory transfer costs during inference. We propose a novel method that estimates the contribution of a neuron (filter) to the final loss and iteratively removes those with smaller scores. We describe two variations of our method using the first and secondorder Taylor expansions to approximate a filter's contribution. Both methods scale consistently across any network layer without requiring per-layer sensitivity analysis and can be applied to any kind of layer, including skip connections. For modern networks trained on ImageNet, we measured experimentally a high (>93%) correlation between the contribution computed by our methods and a reliable estimate of the true importance. Pruning with the proposed methods leads to an improvement over state-ofthe-art in terms of accuracy, FLOPs, and parameter reduction. On ResNet-101, we achieve a 40% FLOPS reduction by removing 30% of the parameters, with a loss of 0.02% in the top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at https://github.com/NVlabs/Taylor_pruning.

修剪神经网络可降低推理时间和记忆成本。在标准硬件上，如果修剪诸如特征地图之类的粗粒结构（例如特征地图），这些好处将特别突出。我们为二阶结构修剪（SOSP）设计了两种新型的基于显着性的方法，其中包括所有结构和层之间的相关性。我们的主要方法SOSP-H采用了创新的二阶近似，可以通过快速的Hessian-vector产品进行显着评估。 SOSP-H因此，尽管考虑到了完整的Hessian，但仍像一阶方法一样缩放。我们通过将SOSP-H与使用公认的Hessian近似值以及许多最先进方法进行比较来验证SOSP-H。尽管SOSP-H在准确性方面的表现或更好，但在可伸缩性和效率方面具有明显的优势。这使我们能够将SOSP-H扩展到大规模视觉任务，即使它捕获了网络所有层的相关性。为了强调我们修剪方法的全球性质，我们不仅通过删除预验证网络的结构，而且还通过检测建筑瓶颈来评估它们的性能。我们表明，我们的算法允许系统地揭示建筑瓶颈，然后将其删除以进一步提高网络的准确性。

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。

随着深度学习的快速发展，神经网络的大小变得越来越大，以使培训和推理经常压倒硬件资源。鉴于神经网络通常被过度参数化，减少这种计算开销的一种有效方法是神经网络修剪，通过删除训练有素的神经网络中的冗余参数。最近观察到，修剪不仅可以减少计算开销，而且可以改善深神经网络（NNS）的经验鲁棒性，这可能是由于消除了虚假相关性的同时保留了预测精度。本文首次证明，修剪通常可以在完整的验证设置下改善基于RELU的NN的认证鲁棒性。使用流行的分支机构（BAB）框架，我们发现修剪可以通过减轻线性放松和子域分裂问题来增强认证稳健性验证的估计结合紧密度。我们通过现成的修剪方法验证了我们的发现，并进一步提出了一种基于稳定性的新修剪方法，该方法量身定制了用于减少神经元不稳定性的新方法，该方法在增强认证的鲁棒性方面优于现有的修剪方法。我们的实验表明，通过适当修剪NN，在标准培训下，其认证准确性最多可提高8.2％，在CIFAR10数据集中的对抗培训下最多可提高24.5％。我们还观察到存在经过认证的彩票票，这些彩票可以符合不同数据集的原始密集型号的标准和认证的稳健精度。我们的发现提供了一个新的角度来研究稀疏性与鲁棒性之间的有趣相互作用，即通过神经元稳定性解释稀疏性和认证鲁棒性的相互作用。代码可在以下网址提供：https：//github.com/vita-group/certifiedpruning。

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.

虽然网络稀疏作为克服神经网络大小的有希望的方向，但它仍然是保持模型准确性的开放问题，并在一般CPU上实现了显着的加速。在本文中，我们提出了一篇新颖的1美元\ Times N $块稀疏模式（块修剪）的概念来打破这种限制。特别是，具有相同输入通道索引的连续$ N $输出内核被分组为一个块，该块用作我们修剪模式的基本修剪粒度。我们的$ 1 \ times n $ sparsity模式prunes这些块被认为不重要。我们还提供过滤器重新排列的工作流程，首先重新排列输出通道尺寸中的权重矩阵，以获得更具影响力的块，以便精度改进，然后将类似的重新排列到输入通道维度中的下一层权重，以确保正确的卷积操作。此外，可以通过并行化块 - 方向的矢量化操作实现在我们的$ 1 \ Times N $块稀疏之后的输出计算，从而导致总基于CPU的平台上的显着加速。通过对ILSVRC-2012的实验证明了我们修剪模式的功效。例如，在50％的稀疏性和$ n = 4 $的情况下，我们的模式在MobileNet-V2的前1个精度的过滤器修剪中获得了大约3.0％的改进。同时，它在Cortex-A7 CPU上获得56.04ms推断，超过体重修剪。代码可在https://github.com/lmbxmu/1xn处获得。

Structured channel pruning has been shown to significantly accelerate inference time for convolution neural networks (CNNs) on modern hardware, with a relatively minor loss of network accuracy. Recent works permanently zero these channels during training, which we observe to significantly hamper final accuracy, particularly as the fraction of the network being pruned increases. We propose Soft Masking for cost-constrained Channel Pruning (SMCP) to allow pruned channels to adaptively return to the network while simultaneously pruning towards a target cost constraint. By adding a soft mask re-parameterization of the weights and channel pruning from the perspective of removing input channels, we allow gradient updates to previously pruned channels and the opportunity for the channels to later return to the network. We then formulate input channel pruning as a global resource allocation problem. Our method outperforms prior works on both the ImageNet classification and PASCAL VOC detection datasets.

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.

知识蒸馏将知识从繁琐的老师转移到小学生。最近的结果表明，对学生友好的老师更适合提炼，因为它提供了更可转移的知识。在这项工作中，我们提出了新颖的框架“修剪，然后蒸馏”，该框架首先修剪模型，以使其更具转让，然后将其提炼为学生。我们提供了几个探索性示例，这些探索性示例与原始未经修复的网络相比，教师教的更好。从理论上讲，我们进一步表明，修剪的老师在蒸馏中扮演正规剂的角色，从而减少了概括误差。基于此结果，我们提出了一种新型的神经网络压缩方案，该方案根据修剪教师形成学生网络，然后采用“修剪，然后蒸馏”策略。该代码可在https://github.com/ososos8888/prune-then-distill上找到

Previous works utilized "smaller-norm-less-important" criterion to prune filters with smaller norm values in a convolutional neural network. In this paper, we analyze this norm-based criterion and point out that its effectiveness depends on two requirements that are not always met: (1) the norm deviation of the filters should be large; (2) the minimum norm of the filters should be small. To solve this problem, we propose a novel filter pruning method, namely Filter Pruning via Geometric Median (FPGM), to compress the model regardless of those two requirements. Unlike previous methods, FPGM compresses CNN models by pruning filters with redundancy, rather than those with "relatively less" importance. When applied to two image classification benchmarks, our method validates its usefulness and strengths. Notably, on CIFAR-10, FPGM reduces more than 52% FLOPs on ResNet-110 with even 2.69% relative accuracy improvement. Moreover, on ILSVRC-2012, FPGM reduces more than 42% FLOPs on ResNet-101 without top-5 accuracy drop, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. Code is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/he-y/filter-pruning-geometric-median * Corresponding Author. Part of this work was done when Yi Yang was visiting Baidu Research during his Professional Experience Program.

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.

结构化修剪是一种常用的技术，用于将深神经网络（DNN）部署到资源受限的设备上。但是，现有的修剪方法通常是启发式，任务指定的，并且需要额外的微调过程。为了克服这些限制，我们提出了一个框架，将DNN压缩成纤薄的架构，具有竞争性表现，并且仅通过列车 - 一次（OTO）减少重大拖车。 OTO包含两个键：（i）我们将DNN的参数分区为零不变组，使我们能够修剪零组而不影响输出; （ii）促进零群，我们制定了结构性稀疏优化问题，提出了一种新颖的优化算法，半空间随机投影梯度（HSPG），以解决它，这优于组稀疏性探索的标准近端方法和保持可比的收敛性。为了展示OTO的有效性，我们从划痕上同时培训和压缩全模型，而无需微调推理加速和参数减少，并且在CIFAR10的VGG16实现最先进的结果，为CIFAR10和Squad的BERT为BERT竞争结果在resnet50上为想象成。源代码可在https://github.com/tianyic/only_train_once上获得。