Model compression techniques reduce the computational load and memory consumption of deep neural networks. After the compression operation, e.g. parameter pruning, the model is normally fine-tuned on the original training dataset to recover from the performance drop caused by compression. However, the training data is not always available due to privacy issues or other factors. In this work, we present a data-free fine-tuning approach for pruning the backbone of deep neural networks. In particular, the pruned network backbone is trained with synthetically generated images, and our proposed intermediate supervision to mimic the unpruned backbone's output feature map. Afterwards, the pruned backbone can be combined with the original network head to make predictions. We generate synthetic images by back-propagating gradients to noise images while relying on L1-pruning for the backbone pruning. In our experiments, we show that our approach is task-independent due to pruning only the backbone. By evaluating our approach on 2D human pose estimation, object detection, and image classification, we demonstrate promising performance compared to the unpruned model. Our code is available at https://github.com/holzbock/dfbf.

本文提出了一种针对深度神经网络剪枝的数据无关的微调方法，使用合成图像进行训练，并通过中间监督来模拟未剪枝网络的输出特征图。实验结果表明，该方法相对于未剪枝模型具有具有很好的性能。

修剪神经网络的无数据骨干微调