An Information Theory-inspired Strategy for Automatic Network Pruning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Zheng, Xiawu, Ma, Yuexiao, Xi, Teng, Zhang, Gang, Ding, Errui, Li, Yuchao, Chen, Jie, Tian, Yonghong, Ji, Rongrong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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_version_ 1866908373081915392
author Zheng, Xiawu
Ma, Yuexiao
Xi, Teng
Zhang, Gang
Ding, Errui
Li, Yuchao
Chen, Jie
Tian, Yonghong
Ji, Rongrong
author_facet Zheng, Xiawu
Ma, Yuexiao
Xi, Teng
Zhang, Gang
Ding, Errui
Li, Yuchao
Chen, Jie
Tian, Yonghong
Ji, Rongrong
contents Despite superior performance on many computer vision tasks, deep convolution neural networks are well known to be compressed on devices that have resource constraints. Most existing network pruning methods require laborious human efforts and prohibitive computation resources, especially when the constraints are changed. This practically limits the application of model compression when the model needs to be deployed on a wide range of devices. Besides, existing methods are still challenged by the missing theoretical guidance. In this paper we propose an information theory-inspired strategy for automatic model compression. The principle behind our method is the information bottleneck theory, i.e., the hidden representation should compress information with each other. We thus introduce the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (nHSIC) on network activations as a stable and generalized indicator of layer importance. When a certain resource constraint is given, we integrate the HSIC indicator with the constraint to transform the architecture search problem into a linear programming problem with quadratic constraints. Such a problem is easily solved by a convex optimization method with a few seconds. We also provide a rigorous proof to reveal that optimizing the normalized HSIC simultaneously minimizes the mutual information between different layers. Without any search process, our method achieves better compression tradeoffs comparing to the state-of-the-art compression algorithms. For instance, with ResNet-50, we achieve a 45.3%-FLOPs reduction, with a 75.75 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Codes are avaliable at https://github.com/MAC-AutoML/ITPruner/tree/master.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2108_08532
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Information Theory-inspired Strategy for Automatic Network Pruning
Zheng, Xiawu
Ma, Yuexiao
Xi, Teng
Zhang, Gang
Ding, Errui
Li, Yuchao
Chen, Jie
Tian, Yonghong
Ji, Rongrong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Despite superior performance on many computer vision tasks, deep convolution neural networks are well known to be compressed on devices that have resource constraints. Most existing network pruning methods require laborious human efforts and prohibitive computation resources, especially when the constraints are changed. This practically limits the application of model compression when the model needs to be deployed on a wide range of devices. Besides, existing methods are still challenged by the missing theoretical guidance. In this paper we propose an information theory-inspired strategy for automatic model compression. The principle behind our method is the information bottleneck theory, i.e., the hidden representation should compress information with each other. We thus introduce the normalized Hilbert-Schmidt Independence Criterion (nHSIC) on network activations as a stable and generalized indicator of layer importance. When a certain resource constraint is given, we integrate the HSIC indicator with the constraint to transform the architecture search problem into a linear programming problem with quadratic constraints. Such a problem is easily solved by a convex optimization method with a few seconds. We also provide a rigorous proof to reveal that optimizing the normalized HSIC simultaneously minimizes the mutual information between different layers. Without any search process, our method achieves better compression tradeoffs comparing to the state-of-the-art compression algorithms. For instance, with ResNet-50, we achieve a 45.3%-FLOPs reduction, with a 75.75 top-1 accuracy on ImageNet. Codes are avaliable at https://github.com/MAC-AutoML/ITPruner/tree/master.
title An Information Theory-inspired Strategy for Automatic Network Pruning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.08532