Group pruning using a bounded lp norm for group gating and regularization

Abstract: Deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art results on several tasks while increasing in complexity. It has been shown that neural networks can be pruned during training by imposing sparsity inducing regularizers. In this paper, we investigate two techniques for group-wise pruning during training in order to improve network effciency. We propose a gating factor after every convolutional layer to induce channel level sparsity, encouraging insignicant channels to become exactly zero. Further, we introduce and analyse a bounded variant of the l1 regularizer, which interpolates between l1 and l0-norms to retain performance of the network at higher pruning rates. To underline effectiveness of the proposed methods, we show that the number of parameters of ResNet-164, DenseNet-40 and MobileNetV2 can be reduced down by 30%, 69%, and 75% on CIFAR100 respectively without a significant drop in accuracy. We achieve state-of-the-art pruning results for ResNet-50 with higher accuracy on ImageNet. Furthermore, we show that the light weight MobileNetV2 can further be compressed on ImageNet without a significant drop in performance.