Decay Pruning Method: Smooth Pruning With a Self-Rectifying Procedure

TL;DR

The paper introduces Decay Pruning Method (DPM), a smooth, multi-step pruning technique with a self-rectifying mechanism that improves accuracy and reduces FLOPs across various pruning methods.

Contribution

It proposes a novel smooth pruning approach with a self-rectifying mechanism, enhancing existing pruning methods without significant accuracy loss.

Findings

Consistent performance improvements across multiple pruning methods.

Effective reduction of FLOPs in various scenarios.

Enhanced generalizability of the pruning approach.

Abstract

Current structured pruning methods often result in considerable accuracy drops due to abrupt network changes and loss of information from pruned structures. To address these issues, we introduce the Decay Pruning Method (DPM), a novel smooth pruning approach with a self-rectifying mechanism. DPM consists of two key components: (i) Smooth Pruning: It converts conventional single-step pruning into multi-step smooth pruning, gradually reducing redundant structures to zero over N steps with ongoing optimization. (ii) Self-Rectifying: This procedure further enhances the aforementioned process by rectifying sub-optimal pruning based on gradient information. Our approach demonstrates strong generalizability and can be easily integrated with various existing pruning methods. We validate the effectiveness of DPM by integrating it with three popular pruning methods: OTOv2, Depgraph, and Gate Decorator. Experimental results show consistent improvements in performance compared to the original pruning methods, along with further reductions of FLOPs in most scenarios.