How to develop slim and accurate deep neural networks has become crucial for real- world applications, especially for those employed in embedded systems. Though previous work along this research line has shown some promising results, most existing methods either fail to significantly compress a well-trained deep network or require a heavy retraining process for the pruned deep network to re-boost its prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a new layer-wise pruning method for deep neural networks. In our proposed method, parameters of each individual layer are pruned independently based on second order derivatives of a layer-wise error function with respect to the corresponding parameters. We prove that the final prediction performance drop after pruning is bounded by a linear combination of the reconstructed errors caused at each layer. Therefore, there is a guarantee that one only needs to perform a light retraining process on the pruned network to resume its original prediction performance. We conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our pruning method compared with several state-of-the-art baseline methods.

本文提出了一种基于层次的剪枝方法对深度神经网络进行压缩，通过独立剪枝每个层次的参数可以保证压缩后的网络只需要进行轻量级的重新训练即可恢复预测能力，并在基准数据集上进行了广泛实验以证明其有效性。

通过分层最优脑外科医生学习剪枝深度神经网络