A well-trained Convolutional Neural Network can easily be pruned without significant loss of performance. This is because of unnecessary overlap in the features captured by the network's filters. Innovations in network architecture such as skip/dense connections and Inception units have mitigated this problem to some extent, but these improvements come with increased computation and memory requirements at run-time. We attempt to address this problem from another angle - not by changing the network structure but by altering the training method. We show that by temporarily pruning and then restoring a subset of the model's filters, and repeating this process cyclically, overlap in the learned features is reduced, producing improved generalization. We show that the existing model-pruning criteria are not optimal for selecting filters to prune in this context and introduce inter-filter orthogonality as the ranking criteria to determine under-expressive filters. Our method is applicable both to vanilla convolutional networks and more complex modern architectures, and improves the performance across a variety of tasks, especially when applied to smaller networks.

研究表明，通过暂时修剪和恢复模型的子集滤波器，反复进行该过程，可以减少所学习特征的重叠，从而提高了模型的泛化能力；而在这种情况下，现有的模型修剪标准并不是选择修剪滤波器的最优策略，因此引入了滤波器之间内部正交性作为排名标准。这种方法适用于各种类型的卷积神经网络，能够提高各种任务的性能，尤其是小型网络的性能。

RePr: 卷积滤波器的改进训练