This paper proposed a Progressive Soft Filter Pruning method (PSFP) to prune the filters of deep Neural Networks which can thus be accelerated in the inference. Specifically, the proposed PSFP method prunes the network progressively and enables the pruned filters to be updated when training the model after pruning. PSFP has three 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 pre-trained model. Large capacity enables our method 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, PSFP from scratch outperforms the previous filter pruning methods. 3) Pruning the neural network progressively makes the selection of low-norm filters much more stable, which has a potential to get a better performance. Moreover, our approach has been demonstrated effective for many advanced CNN architectures. Notably, on ILSCRC-2012, our method reduces more than 42% FLOPs on ResNet-101 with even 0.2% top-5 accuracy improvement, which has advanced the state-of-the-art. On ResNet-50, our progressive pruning method have 1.08% top-1 accuracy improvement over the pruning method without progressive pruning.

本文提出了一种渐进式软过滤剪枝方法以加速卷积神经网络的推理过程，通过在重新训练阶段更新裁剪过的滤波器并逐渐剪枝来避免信息丢失，实验结果表明，与软过滤剪枝相比，本文提出的方法在 ResNet-50 上将 FLOPs 降低了 40%，但只有 0.14% 的 top-5 准确度下降。

深度卷积神经网络的渐近软过滤剪枝