Search

Filter pruning has been successfully applied in convolutional neural networks (CNN) to reduce model redundancy and speed up inference. Current pruning algorithms require setting a target value for a pruned model, which is not conducive to the rapid implementation in practical application. Firstly, for a target model, it may be necessary to pay attention to multiple performances at the same time, but it is hard to keep the best trade-off among indicators. Secondly, it is time-consuming to find a suitable model by pruning in a trial-and-error way. Therefore, this paper attempts to combine the most concerning indicators into a search target, rather than producing a model that only contains some pre-defined constraint. Specifically, the multi-object differential evolution algorithm is introduced into the search process, which is used to obtain a set of sparse structures that have taken all useful indicators into account. Then select proper sub-network to retrain from search results according to actual requirements. Experiments on multiple advanced CNN networks show that our algorithm can compress different indicators while keeping comparable or better performance than prior works. On ImageNet, pruning based on ResNet50 reduces FLOPs by 60.4%, while the accuracy of top-1 and top-5 only loses 1.09% and 0.57%, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]