Deep learning harnesses massive parallel floating-point processing to train and evaluate large neural networks. Trends indicate that deeper and larger neural networks with an increasing number of parameters achieve higher accuracy than smaller neural networks. This performance improvement, which often requires heavy compute for both training and evaluation, eventually needs to translate well to resource-constrained hardware for practical value. Structured pruning asserts that while large networks enable us to find solutions to complex computer vision problems, a smaller, computationally efficient sub-network can be derived from the large neural network that retains model accuracy but significantly improves computational efficiency. We generalize structured pruning with algorithms for network augmentation, pruning, sub-network collapse and removal. In addition, we demonstrate efficient and stable convergence up to 93% sparsity and 95% FLOPs reduction without loss of inference accuracy using with continuous relaxation matching or exceeding the state of the art for all structured pruning methods. The resulting CNN executes efficiently on GPU hardware without computationally expensive sparse matrix operations. We achieve this with routine automatable operations on classification and segmentation problems using CIFAR-10, ImageNet, and CityScapes datasets with the ResNet and U-NET network architectures.

使用结构化剪枝方法，在不降低推理准确度的情况下，通过算法的网络增强、剪枝、子网络合并和移除，实现了高达93%的稀疏度与95%FLOPs的减少，同时在分类和分割问题上超过了先进水平，并且避免了在GPU上进行计算昂贵的稀疏矩阵运算。

结构化剪枝中连续松弛的泛化