AutoMC: Automated Model Compression based on Domain Knowledge and Progressive search strategy

TL;DR

AutoMC is an automatic model compression tool that leverages domain knowledge and a progressive search strategy to efficiently find optimal compression schemes, making model compression accessible to non-experts.

Contribution

It introduces a domain knowledge-based understanding of compression methods and a progressive search strategy to automate and optimize model compression.

Findings

AutoMC achieves satisfying compression schemes quickly.

AutoMC effectively leverages domain knowledge for better compression.

AutoMC outperforms manual methods in efficiency and quality.

Abstract

Model compression methods can reduce model complexity on the premise of maintaining acceptable performance, and thus promote the application of deep neural networks under resource constrained environments. Despite their great success, the selection of suitable compression methods and design of details of the compression scheme are difficult, requiring lots of domain knowledge as support, which is not friendly to non-expert users. To make more users easily access to the model compression scheme that best meet their needs, in this paper, we propose AutoMC, an effective automatic tool for model compression. AutoMC builds the domain knowledge on model compression to deeply understand the characteristics and advantages of each compression method under different settings. In addition, it presents a progressive search strategy to efficiently explore pareto optimal compression scheme according to the learned prior knowledge combined with the historical evaluation information. Extensive experimental results show that AutoMC can provide satisfying compression schemes within short time, demonstrating the effectiveness of AutoMC.