Convolution neural networks (CNNs) have achieved remarkable success, but typically accompany high computation cost and numerous redundant weight parameters. To reduce the FLOPs, structure pruning is a popular approach to remove the entire hidden structures via introducing coarse-grained sparsity. Meanwhile, plentiful pruning works leverage fine-grained sparsity instead (sparsity are randomly distributed), whereas their sparse models lack special designed computing library for potential speedup. In this technical report, we study and present an efficient convolution neural network inference system to accelerate its forward pass by utilizing the fine-grained sparsity of compressed CNNs. Our developed FSCNN is established based on a set of specialized designed sparse data structures, operators and associated algorithms. Experimentally, we validate that FSCNN outperforms standard deep learning library PyTorch on popular CNN architectures such as VGG16 if sufficiently high sparsity exhibits. However, due to the contiguity issue of sparse operators, FSCNN is typically not comparable with highly optimized dense operator. Therefore, coarse-grained (structured) sparsity is our recommendation for generic model compression.

本文主要介绍了利用大规模稀疏结构提高卷积神经网络推理效率的方法， 开发了一种名为 FSCNN 的稀疏卷积神经网络推理系统，能够在一定的稀疏程度下优于标准深度学习库 PyTorch，但遇到高优化密集运算时推理效率有一定局限性，因此推荐采用粗粒度稀疏度进行通用模型压缩。

FSCNN:一种快速的稀疏卷积神经网络推理系统