2021/01/20 by Mingbao Lin, Lin, Mingbao, Rongrong Ji +11 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Advanced Image and Video Retrieval Techniques #Advanced Neural Network Applications #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.CV
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2101.07985
Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (IEEE TNNLS)
openalex publication_date 2021/01/20 · arxiv created 2021/05/26 · arxiv updated 2021/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Popular network pruning algorithms reduce redundant information by optimizing hand-crafted models, and may cause suboptimal performance and long time in selecting filters. We innovatively introduce adaptive exemplar filters to simplify the algorithm design, resulting in an automatic and efficient pruning approach called EPruner. Inspired by the face recognition community, we use a message passing algorithm Affinity Propagation on the weight matrices to obtain an adaptive number of exemplars, which then act as the preserved filters. EPruner breaks the dependency on the training data in determining the "important" filters and allows the CPU implementation in seconds, an order of magnitude faster than GPU based SOTAs. Moreover, we show that the weights of exemplars provide a better initialization for the fine-tuning. On VGGNet-16, EPruner achieves a 76.34%-FLOPs reduction by removing 88.80% parameters, with 0.06% accuracy improvement on CIFAR-10. In ResNet-152, EPruner achieves a 65.12%-FLOPs reduction by removing 64.18% parameters, with only 0.71% top-5 accuracy loss on ILSVRC-2012. Our code can be available at https://github.com/lmbxmu/EPruner.