FALCON: FLOP-Aware Combinatorial Optimization for Neural Network Pruning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Meng, Xiang, Chen, Wenyu, Benbaki, Riade, Mazumder, Rahul
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Meng, Xiang
Chen, Wenyu
Benbaki, Riade
Mazumder, Rahul
author_facet Meng, Xiang
Chen, Wenyu
Benbaki, Riade
Mazumder, Rahul
contents The increasing computational demands of modern neural networks present deployment challenges on resource-constrained devices. Network pruning offers a solution to reduce model size and computational cost while maintaining performance. However, most current pruning methods focus primarily on improving sparsity by reducing the number of nonzero parameters, often neglecting other deployment costs such as inference time, which are closely related to the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs). In this paper, we propose FALCON, a novel combinatorial-optimization-based framework for network pruning that jointly takes into account model accuracy (fidelity), FLOPs, and sparsity constraints. A main building block of our approach is an integer linear program (ILP) that simultaneously handles FLOP and sparsity constraints. We present a novel algorithm to approximately solve the ILP. We propose a novel first-order method for our optimization framework which makes use of our ILP solver. Using problem structure (e.g., the low-rank structure of approx. Hessian), we can address instances with millions of parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that FALCON achieves superior accuracy compared to other pruning approaches within a fixed FLOP budget. For instance, for ResNet50 with 20% of the total FLOPs retained, our approach improves the accuracy by 48% relative to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, in gradual pruning settings with re-training between pruning steps, our framework outperforms existing pruning methods, emphasizing the significance of incorporating both FLOP and sparsity constraints for effective network pruning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_07094
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FALCON: FLOP-Aware Combinatorial Optimization for Neural Network Pruning
Meng, Xiang
Chen, Wenyu
Benbaki, Riade
Mazumder, Rahul
Machine Learning
The increasing computational demands of modern neural networks present deployment challenges on resource-constrained devices. Network pruning offers a solution to reduce model size and computational cost while maintaining performance. However, most current pruning methods focus primarily on improving sparsity by reducing the number of nonzero parameters, often neglecting other deployment costs such as inference time, which are closely related to the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs). In this paper, we propose FALCON, a novel combinatorial-optimization-based framework for network pruning that jointly takes into account model accuracy (fidelity), FLOPs, and sparsity constraints. A main building block of our approach is an integer linear program (ILP) that simultaneously handles FLOP and sparsity constraints. We present a novel algorithm to approximately solve the ILP. We propose a novel first-order method for our optimization framework which makes use of our ILP solver. Using problem structure (e.g., the low-rank structure of approx. Hessian), we can address instances with millions of parameters. Our experiments demonstrate that FALCON achieves superior accuracy compared to other pruning approaches within a fixed FLOP budget. For instance, for ResNet50 with 20% of the total FLOPs retained, our approach improves the accuracy by 48% relative to state-of-the-art. Furthermore, in gradual pruning settings with re-training between pruning steps, our framework outperforms existing pruning methods, emphasizing the significance of incorporating both FLOP and sparsity constraints for effective network pruning.
title FALCON: FLOP-Aware Combinatorial Optimization for Neural Network Pruning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.07094