Accelerate CNN via Recursive Bayesian Pruning

Channel Pruning, widely used for accelerating Convolutional Neural Networks, is an NP-hard problem due to the inter-layer dependency of channel redundancy. Existing methods generally ignored the above dependency for computation simplicity. To solve the problem, under the Bayesian framework, we here propose a layer-wise Recursive Bayesian Pruning method (RBP). A new dropout-based measurement of redundancy, which facilitate the computation of posterior assuming inter-layer dependency, is introduced. Specifically, we model the noise across layers as a Markov chain and target its posterior to reflect the inter-layer dependency. Considering the closed form solution for posterior is intractable, we derive a sparsity-inducing Dirac-like prior which regularizes the distribution of the designed noise to automatically approximate the posterior. Compared with the existing methods, no additional overhead is required when the inter-layer dependency assumed. The redundant channels can be simply identified by tiny dropout noise and directly pruned layer by layer. Experiments on popular CNN architectures have shown that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-arts. Particularly, we achieve up to 5.0x, 2.2x and 1.7x FLOPs reduction with little accuracy loss on the large scale dataset ILSVRC2012 for VGG16, ResNet50 and MobileNetV2, respectively.