Filter pruning is one of the most effective ways to accelerate and compress convolutional neural networks (CNNs). In this work, we propose a global filter pruning algorithm called Gate Decorator, which transforms a vanilla CNN module by multiplying its output by the channel-wise scaling factors, i.e. gate. When the scaling factor is set to zero, it is equivalent to removing the corresponding filter. We use Taylor expansion to estimate the change in the loss function caused by setting the scaling factor to zero and use the estimation for the global filter importance ranking. Then we prune the network by removing those unimportant filters. After pruning, we merge all the scaling factors into its original module, so no special operations or structures are introduced. Moreover, we propose an iterative pruning framework called Tick-Tock to improve pruning accuracy. The extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches. For example, we achieve the state-of-the-art pruning ratio on ResNet-56 by reducing 70% FLOPs without noticeable loss in accuracy. For ResNet-50 on ImageNet, our pruned model with 40% FLOPs reduction outperforms the baseline model by 0.31% in top-1 accuracy. Various datasets are used, including CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, CUB-200, ImageNet ILSVRC-12 and PASCAL VOC 2011. Code is available at github.com/youzhonghui/gate-decorator-pruning

本文提出了一种名为Gate Decorator的全局滤波器剪枝算法，该算法通过乘以通道缩放因子来转换卷积神经网络模块，并使用Taylor展开估算剪枝后的损失函数变化并使用估值进行全局滤波器重要性排序，然后通过删除无关紧要的滤波器来剪枝网络，并且通过迭代剪枝框架Tick-Tock提高准确性，实验证明该方法的有效性。

Gate Decorator: 全局过滤剪枝方法用于加速深度卷积神经网络