LEAN: graph-based pruning for convolutional neural networks by extracting longest chains

Neural network pruning techniques can substantially reduce the computational cost of applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Common pruning methods determine which convolutional filters to remove by ranking the filters individually, i.e., without taking into account their interdependence. In...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2022-06
Main Authors: Schoonhoven, Richard, Hendriksen, Allard A, Pelt, Daniël M, Batenburg, K Joost
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Algorithms
Artificial neural networks
Chains
Convolution
Graph theory
Neural networks
Substructures
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Neural network pruning techniques can substantially reduce the computational cost of applying convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Common pruning methods determine which convolutional filters to remove by ranking the filters individually, i.e., without taking into account their interdependence. In this paper, we advocate the viewpoint that pruning should consider the interdependence between series of consecutive operators. We propose the LongEst-chAiN (LEAN) method that prunes CNNs by using graph-based algorithms to select relevant chains of convolutions. A CNN is interpreted as a graph, with the operator norm of each operator as distance metric for the edges. LEAN pruning iteratively extracts the highest value path from the graph to keep. In our experiments, we test LEAN pruning on several image-to-image tasks, including the well-known CamVid dataset, and a real-world X-ray CT dataset. Results indicate that LEAN pruning can result in networks with similar accuracy, while using 1.7-12x fewer convolutional filters than existing approaches.
ISSN:2331-8422