Convolutional neural network (CNN) pruning has become one of the most successful network compression approaches in recent years. Existing works on network pruning usually focus on removing the least important filters in the network to achieve compact architectures. In this study, we claim that identifying structural redundancy plays a more essential role than finding unimportant filters, theoretically and empirically. We first statistically model the network pruning problem in a redundancy reduction perspective and find that pruning in the layer(s) with the most structural redundancy outperforms pruning the least important filters across all layers. Based on this finding, we then propose a network pruning approach that identifies structural redundancy of a CNN and prunes filters in the selected layer(s) with the most redundancy. Experiments on various benchmark network architectures and datasets show that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art.

本文提出了一种卷积神经网络的结构冗余剪枝方法，通过在最具有结构冗余性的层剪枝，可以相对于之前研究集中在去除不重要滤波器的方法，更有效地压缩网络架构，并在不同的基准模型和数据集上获得了显著优越的表现

卷积神经网络结构冗余减少的剪枝