Pruning convolutional filters has demonstrated its effectiveness in
compressing ConvNets. Prior art in filter pruning requires users to specify a
target model complexity (e.g., model size or FLOP count) for the resulting
architecture. However, determining a target model complexity can be difficult
for optimizing various embodied AI applications such as autonomous robots,
drones, and user-facing applications. First, both the accuracy and the speed of
ConvNets can affect the performance of the application. Second, the performance
of the application can be hard to assess without evaluating ConvNets during
inference. As a consequence, finding a sweet-spot between the accuracy and
speed via filter pruning, which needs to be done in a trial-and-error fashion,
can be time-consuming. This work takes a first step toward making this process
more efficient by altering the goal of model compression to producing a set of
ConvNets with various accuracy and latency trade-offs instead of producing one
ConvNet targeting some pre-defined latency constraint. To this end, we propose
to learn a global ranking of the filters across different layers of the
ConvNet, which is used to obtain a set of ConvNet architectures that have
different accuracy/latency trade-offs by pruning the bottom-ranked filters. Our
proposed algorithm, LeGR, is shown to be 2x to 3x faster than prior work while
having comparable or better performance when targeting seven pruned ResNet-56
with different accuracy/FLOPs profiles on the CIFAR-100 dataset. Additionally,
we have evaluated LeGR on ImageNet and Bird-200 with ResNet-50 and MobileNetV2
to demonstrate its effectiveness. Code available at
this https URL

该论文提出了一种新的卷积神经网络滤波器裁剪算法，名为 LeGR，通过产生一组具有不同精度和延迟权衡的卷积神经网络来代替产生一个具有预定义延迟约束的卷积神经网络，且相比于之前的方法，LeGR 可以在保持性能的情况下快 2-3 倍。