Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces SP-Net, a pruning-based approach for slimmable neural networks that improves accuracy, reduces training time, and maintains efficiency, outperforming existing methods and rivaling NAS models on ImageNet.

Contribution

Proposes SP-Net, a pruning-based method for slimmable networks with multi-base pruning and new pruning procedures, eliminating the need for complex architecture search.

Findings

SP-Net improves accuracy by up to 4.4% over S-Net for VGGNet.

SP-Net achieves comparable or better performance than NAS models.

Method is compatible with various channel pruning techniques.

Abstract

Slimmable Neural Networks (S-Net) is a novel network which enabled to select one of the predefined proportions of channels (sub-network) dynamically depending on the current computational resource availability. The accuracy of each sub-network on S-Net, however, is inferior to that of individually trained networks of the same size due to its difficulty of simultaneous optimization on different sub-networks. In this paper, we propose Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks (SP-Net), which has sub-network structures learned by pruning instead of adopting structures with the same proportion of channels in each layer (width multiplier) like S-Net, and we also propose new pruning procedures: multi-base pruning instead of one-shot or iterative pruning to realize high accuracy and huge training time saving. We also introduced slimmable channel sorting (scs) to achieve calculation as fast as S-Net and zero padding match (zpm) pruning to prune residual structure in more efficient way. SP-Net can be combined with any kind of channel pruning methods and does not require any complicated processing or time-consuming architecture search like NAS models. Compared with each sub-network of the same FLOPs on S-Net, SP-Net improves accuracy by 1.2-1.5% for ResNet-50, 0.9-4.4% for VGGNet, 1.3-2.7% for MobileNetV1, 1.4-3.1% for MobileNetV2 on ImageNet. Furthermore, our methods outperform other SOTA pruning methods and are on par with various NAS models according to our experimental results on ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/hideakikuratsu/SP-Net.