Structure pruning is an effective method to compress and accelerate neural networks. While filter and channel pruning are preferable to other structure pruning methods in terms of realistic acceleration and hardware compatibility, pruning methods with a finer granularity, such as intra-channel pruning, are expected to be capable of yielding more compact and computationally efficient networks. Typical intra-channel pruning methods utilize a static and hand-crafted pruning granularity due to a large search space, which leaves room for improvement in their pruning performance. In this work, we introduce a novel structure pruning method, termed as dynamic structure pruning, to identify optimal pruning granularities for intra-channel pruning. In contrast to existing intra-channel pruning methods, the proposed method automatically optimizes dynamic pruning granularities in each layer while training deep neural networks. To achieve this, we propose a differentiable group learning method designed to efficiently learn a pruning granularity based on gradient-based learning of filter groups. The experimental results show that dynamic structure pruning achieves state-of-the-art pruning performance and better realistic acceleration on a GPU compared with channel pruning. In particular, it reduces the FLOPs of ResNet50 by 71.85% without accuracy degradation on the ImageNet dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/irishev/DSP.

本文提出了一种名为动态结构修剪的结构修剪方法，基于组梯度学习实现了细粒度修剪，并在训练深度神经网络时优化修剪粒度，实验结果表明在ImageNet数据集上，动态结构修剪对ResNet50模型进行修剪可将FLOPs降低71.85%且不影响模型准确率，并在GPU加速方面优于通道修剪。

用于压缩卷积神经网络的动态结构剪枝