Structural Alignment for Network Pruning through Partial Regularization

In this paper, we propose a novel channel pruning method to reduce the computational and storage costs of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Many existing one-shot pruning methods directly remove redundant structures, which brings a huge gap between the model before and after network pruning. This gap will no doubt result in performance loss for network pruning. To mitigate this gap, we first learn a target sub-network during the model training process, and then we use this sub-network to guide the learning of model weights through partial regularization. The target sub-network is learned and produced by using an architecture generator, and it can be optimized efficiently. In addition, we also derive the proximal gradient for our proposed partial regularization to facilitate the structural alignment process. With these designs, the gap between the pruned model and the sub-network is reduced, thus improving the pruning performance. Empirical results also suggest that the sub-network found by our method has a much higher performance than the one-shot pruning setting. Extensive experiments show that our method can achieve state-of-the-art performances on CIFAR-10 and Im-ageNet with ResNets and MobileNet-V2.