Channel pruning is one of the predominant approaches for deep model compression. Existing pruning methods either train from scratch with sparsity constraints on channels, or minimize the reconstruction error between the pre-trained feature maps and the compressed ones. Both strategies suffer from some limitations: the former kind is computationally expensive and difficult to converge, whilst the latter kind optimizes the reconstruction error but ignores the discriminative power of channels. To overcome these drawbacks, we investigate a simple-yet-effective method, called discrimination-aware channel pruning, to choose those channels that really contribute to discriminative power. To this end, we introduce additional losses into the network to increase the discriminative power of intermediate layers and then select the most discriminative channels for each layer by considering the additional loss and the reconstruction error. Last, we propose a greedy algorithm to conduct channel selection and parameter optimization in an iterative way. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. For example, on ILSVRC-12, our pruned ResNet-50 with 30% reduction of channels even outperforms the original model by 0.39% in top-1 accuracy.

介绍了一种有效的基于鉴别力的通道剪枝方法，利用额外的损失函数增加中间层的鉴别力并根据重构误差和额外损失函数选择最具鉴别力的通道，并提出了一种迭代贪心算法来优化参数和通道选择。对类似于ILSVRC-12的测试数据，使用该算法对ResNet-50剪枝显示出相当有效的性能。

深度神经网络的鉴别感知通道剪枝