A New Network Pruning Framework Based on Rewind.

Model pruning is one of the main methods of deep neural network model compression. However, the existing model pruning methods are inefficient, there is still a lot of redundancy in the network, and the pruning has a great impact on the accuracy. In addition, the traditional pruning process usually needs to fine-tune the network to restore accuracy, and fine-tuning has a limited effect on accuracy recovery, so it is difficult to achieve a high level of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new neural network pruning framework: the channel sparsity is realized by introducing a scale factor, and the sparse network is pruned by setting a global threshold, which greatly improves the efficiency of pruning. After pruning, this paper proposes a rewind method to restore the accuracy, that is, save the weight after training, and then reload it on the network for training to restore the accuracy. In addition, we also study the best rewind point of the three networks. The experimental results show that our method significantly reduces the number of parameters and FLOPs without affecting or even improving the accuracy, and the rewind method proposed by us achieves a better accuracy recovery effect than fine-tuning. At the same time, we find that the epoch with the highest accuracy is the best rewind point, and the accuracy is the highest after saving its corresponding weight and retraining the model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]