Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Wei, Deng, Xing, Shao, Haijian, Jiang, Yingtao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09352
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908764953640960
author Liu, Wei
Deng, Xing
Shao, Haijian
Jiang, Yingtao
author_facet Liu, Wei
Deng, Xing
Shao, Haijian
Jiang, Yingtao
contents We propose Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning (SCAP), a reconstruction-based criterion that measures functional redundancy at the level of individual output channels. For each convolutional layer, we construct a complex interaction field by pairing the full multi-channel input activation as the real part with a single output-channel activation (spatially aligned and broadcast across input channels) as the imaginary part. We transform this complex field to the frequency domain and train a low-capacity autoencoder to reconstruct normalized spectra. Channels whose spectra are reconstructed with high fidelity are interpreted as lying close to a low-dimensional manifold captured by the autoencoder and are therefore more compressible; conversely, channels with low fidelity are retained as they encode information that cannot be compactly represented by the learned manifold. This yields an importance score (optionally fused with the filter L1 norm) that supports simple threshold-based pruning and produces a structurally consistent pruned network. On VGG16 trained on CIFAR-10, at a fixed threshold of 0.6, we obtain 90.11% FLOP reduction and 96.30% parameter reduction with an absolute Top-1 accuracy drop of 1.67% from a 93.44% baseline after fine-tuning, demonstrating that spectral reconstruction fidelity of complex interaction fields is an effective proxy for channel-level redundancy under aggressive compression.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09352
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning: A Fidelity-Guided Criterion for Extreme Structured Channel Compression
Liu, Wei
Deng, Xing
Shao, Haijian
Jiang, Yingtao
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We propose Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning (SCAP), a reconstruction-based criterion that measures functional redundancy at the level of individual output channels. For each convolutional layer, we construct a complex interaction field by pairing the full multi-channel input activation as the real part with a single output-channel activation (spatially aligned and broadcast across input channels) as the imaginary part. We transform this complex field to the frequency domain and train a low-capacity autoencoder to reconstruct normalized spectra. Channels whose spectra are reconstructed with high fidelity are interpreted as lying close to a low-dimensional manifold captured by the autoencoder and are therefore more compressible; conversely, channels with low fidelity are retained as they encode information that cannot be compactly represented by the learned manifold. This yields an importance score (optionally fused with the filter L1 norm) that supports simple threshold-based pruning and produces a structurally consistent pruned network. On VGG16 trained on CIFAR-10, at a fixed threshold of 0.6, we obtain 90.11% FLOP reduction and 96.30% parameter reduction with an absolute Top-1 accuracy drop of 1.67% from a 93.44% baseline after fine-tuning, demonstrating that spectral reconstruction fidelity of complex interaction fields is an effective proxy for channel-level redundancy under aggressive compression.
title Spectral Complex Autoencoder Pruning: A Fidelity-Guided Criterion for Extreme Structured Channel Compression
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09352