Neural networks performance has been significantly improved in the last few years, at the cost of an increasing number of floating point operations per second (FLOPs). However, more FLOPs can be an issue when computational resources are limited. As an attempt to solve this problem, pruning filters is a common solution, but most existing pruning methods do not preserve the model accuracy efficiently and therefore require a large number of finetuning epochs. In this paper, we propose an automatic pruning method that learns which neurons to preserve in order to maintain the model accuracy while reducing the FLOPs to a predefined target. To accomplish this task, we introduce a trainable bottleneck that only requires one single epoch with 25.6% (CIFAR-10) or 7.49% (ILSVRC2012) of the dataset to learn which filters to prune. Experiments on various architectures and datasets show that the proposed method can not only preserve the accuracy after pruning but also outperform existing methods after finetuning. We achieve a 52.00% FLOPs reduction on ResNet-50, with a Top-1 accuracy of 47.51% after pruning and a state-of-the-art (SOTA) accuracy of 76.63% after finetuning on ILSVRC2012. Code is available at (link anonymized for review).

本文提出一种自动修剪方法来减少神经网络中的FLOPs，该方法通过引入可训练瓶颈来学习哪些神经元需要被保留以保持模型准确性，实验证明，该方法可以在保持模型准确性的前提下显著减少模型的FLOPs。

高效保留模型准确性的自动神经网络剪枝