The network pruning algorithm based on evolutionary multi-objective (EMO) can
balance the pruning rate and performance of the network. However, its
population-based nature often suffers from the complex pruning optimization
space and the highly resource-consuming pruning structure verification process,
which limits its application. To this end, this paper proposes an EMO joint
pruning with multiple sub-networks (EMO-PMS) to reduce space complexity and
resource consumption. First, a divide-and-conquer EMO network pruning framework
is proposed, which decomposes the complex EMO pruning task on the whole network
into easier sub-tasks on multiple sub-networks. On the one hand, this
decomposition reduces the pruning optimization space and decreases the
optimization difficulty; on the other hand, the smaller network structure
converges faster, so the computational resource consumption of the proposed
algorithm is lower. Secondly, a sub-network training method based on
cross-network constraints is designed so that the sub-network can process the
features generated by the previous one through feature constraints. This method
allows sub-networks optimized independently to collaborate better and improves
the overall performance of the pruned network. Finally, a multiple sub-networks
joint pruning method based on EMO is proposed. For one thing, it can accurately
measure the feature processing capability of the sub-networks with the
pre-trained feature selector. For another, it can combine multi-objective
pruning results on multiple sub-networks through global performance impairment
ranking to design a joint pruning scheme. The proposed algorithm is validated
on three datasets with different challenging. Compared with fifteen advanced
pruning algorithms, the experiment results exhibit the effectiveness and
efficiency of the proposed algorithm.

本研究提出一种基于进化多目标（EMO）算法的网络修剪算法，结合多子网络来降低空间复杂度和资源消耗，其中提出了分而治之的 EMO 网络修剪框架和基于交叉网络约束的子网络训练方法，并设计了多子网络联合修剪方法来优化整个修剪网络的性能。实验结果表明，此算法比十五种先进的修剪算法更为有效和高效。