Due to data privacy issues, accelerating networks with tiny training sets has become a critical need in practice. Previous methods achieved promising results empirically by filter-level pruning. In this paper, we both study this problem theoretically and propose an effective algorithm aligning well with our theoretical results. First, we propose the finetune convexity hypothesis to explain why recent few-shot compression algorithms do not suffer from overfitting problems. Based on it, a theory is further established to explain these methods for the first time. Compared to naively finetuning a pruned network, feature mimicking is proved to achieve a lower variance of parameters and hence enjoys easier optimization. With our theoretical conclusions, we claim dropping blocks is a fundamentally superior few-shot compression scheme in terms of more convex optimization and a higher acceleration ratio. To choose which blocks to drop, we propose a new metric, recoverability, to effectively measure the difficulty of recovering the compressed network. Finally, we propose an algorithm named PRACTISE to accelerate networks using only tiny training sets. PRACTISE outperforms previous methods by a significant margin. For 22% latency reduction, it surpasses previous methods by on average 7 percentage points on ImageNet-1k. It also works well under data-free or out-of-domain data settings. Our code is at https://github.com/DoctorKey/Practise

本文探讨了小样本训练集下网络加速的问题，提出少样本压缩算法并解释了其原理。文中同时提出了特征模仿、块剪枝等策略以及恢复度量、PRACTISE 算法等方法，实现了比其他方法更高效的网络加速。

微型集合的实用网络加速：假设，理论和算法