We revisit the idea of brain damage, i.e. the pruning of the coefficients of a neural network, and suggest how brain damage can be modified and used to speedup convolutional layers in ConvNets. The approach uses the fact that many efficient implementations reduce generalized convolutions to matrix multiplications. The suggested brain damage process prunes the convolutional kernel tensor in a group-wise fashion. After such pruning, convolutions can be reduced to multiplications of thinned dense matrices, which leads to speedup. We investigate different ways to add group-wise prunning to the learning process, and show that severalfold speedups of convolutional layers can be attained using group-sparsity regularizers. Our approach can adjust the shapes of the receptive fields in the convolutional layers, and even prune excessive feature maps from ConvNets, all in data-driven way.
Group-wise Brain Damage REF revisits the concept of OBD and leverages the fact that convolutions are in practice matrix multiplications.
Fast ConvNets Using Group-Wise Brain Damage
2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
Computer Science