CHEX: CHannel EXploration for CNN Model Compression

Zejiang Hou, Minghai Qin, Fei Sun, Xiaolong Ma, Kun Yuan, Yi Xu, Yen Kuang Chen, Rong Jin, Yuan Xie, Sun Yuan Kung

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

49 Scopus citations

Abstract

Channel pruning has been broadly recognized as an effective technique to reduce the computation and memory cost of deep convolutional neural networks. However, conventional pruning methods have limitations in that: they are restricted to pruning process only, and they require a fully pre-trained large model. Such limitations may lead to sub-optimal model quality as well as excessive memory and training cost. In this paper, we propose a novel Channel Exploration methodology, dubbed as CHEX, to rectify these problems. As opposed to pruning-only strategy, we propose to repeatedly prune and regrow the channels throughout the training process, which reduces the risk of pruning important channels prematurely. More exactly: From intra-Layer's aspect, we tackle the channel pruning problem via a well-known column subset selection (CSS) formulation. From inter-Layer's aspect, our regrowing stages open a path for dynamically re-allocating the number of channels across all the layers under a global channel sparsity constraint. In addition, all the exploration process is done in a single training from scratch without the need of a pre-trained large model. Experimental results demonstrate that CHEX can effectively reduce the FLOPs of diverse CNN architectures on a variety of computer vision tasks, including image classification, object detection, instance segmentation, and 3D vision. For example, our compressed ResNet-50 model on ImageNet dataset achieves 76% top-l accuracy with only 25% FLOPs of the original ResNet-50 model, outperforming previous state-of-the-art channel pruning methods. The checkpoints and code are available at here.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022
PublisherIEEE Computer Society
Pages12277-12288
Number of pages12
ISBN (Electronic)9781665469463
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Jun 19 2022Jun 24 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Volume2022-June
ISSN (Print)1063-6919

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, CVPR 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period6/19/226/24/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition

Keywords

  • Efficient learning and inferences

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