Entropy Induced Pruning Framework for Convolutional Neural Networks

Structured pruning techniques have achieved great compression performance on convolutional neural networks for image classification tasks. However, the majority of existing methods are sensitive with respect to the model parameters, and their pruning results may be unsatisfactory when the original model is trained poorly. That is, they need the original model to be fully trained, to obtain useful weight information. This is time-consuming, and makes the effectiveness of the pruning results dependent on the degree of model optimization. To address the above issue, we propose a novel metric named Average Filter Information Entropy (AFIE). It decomposes the weight matrix of each layer into a low-rank space, and quantifies the filter importance based on the distribution of the normalized eigenvalues. Intuitively, the eigenvalues capture the covariance among filters, and therefore could be a good guide for pruning. Since the distribution of eigenvalues is robust to the updating of parameters, AFIE can yield a stable evaluation for the importance of each filter no matter whether the original model is trained fully. We implement our AFIE-based pruning method for three popular CNN models of AlexNet, VGG-16, and ResNet-50, and test them on three widely-used image datasets MNIST, CIFAR-10, and ImageNet, respectively. The experimental results are encouraging. We surprisingly observe that for our methods, even when the original model is trained with only one epoch, the AFIE score of each filter keeps identical to the results when the model is fully-trained. This fully indicates the effectiveness of the proposed pruning method.