Neural Network Pruning by Cooperative Coevolution

Haopu Shang, Jialiang Wu, Wenjing Hong, Chao Qian

2022Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence22 citationsDOI Open Access PDF

Abstract

Neural network pruning is a popular model compression method which can significantly reduce the computing cost with negligible loss of accuracy. Recently, filters are often pruned directly by designing proper criteria or using auxiliary modules to measure their importance, which, however, requires expertise and trial-and-error. Due to the advantage of automation, pruning by evolutionary algorithms (EAs) has attracted much attention, but the performance is limited for deep neural networks as the search space can be quite large. In this paper, we propose a new filter pruning algorithm CCEP by cooperative coevolution, which prunes the filters in each layer by EAs separately. That is, CCEP reduces the pruning space by a divide-and-conquer strategy. The experiments show that CCEP can achieve a competitive performance with the state-of-the-art pruning methods, e.g., prune ResNet56 for 63.42% FLOPs on CIFAR10 with -0.24% accuracy drop, and ResNet50 for 44.56% FLOPs on ImageNet with 0.07% accuracy drop.

Topics & Concepts

PruningFLOPSComputer scienceArtificial neural networkArtificial intelligenceDeep neural networksMachine learningParallel computingBiologyAgronomyAdvanced Neural Network ApplicationsMachine Learning and Data ClassificationDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning