Making deep convolutional neural networks more accurate typically comes at the cost of increased computational and memory resources. In this paper, we exploit the fact that the importance of features computed by convolutional layers is highly input-dependent, and propose feature boosting and suppression (FBS), a new method to predictively amplify salient convolutional channels and skip unimportant ones at run-time. FBS introduces small auxiliary connections to existing convolutional layers. In contrast to channel pruning methods which permanently remove channels, it preserves the full network structures and accelerates convolution by dynamically skipping unimportant input and output channels. FBS-augmented networks are trained with conventional stochastic gradient descent, making it readily available for many state-of-the-art CNNs. We compare FBS to a range of existing channel pruning and dynamic execution schemes and demonstrate large improvements on ImageNet classification. Experiments show that FBS can accelerate VGG-16 by 5× and improve the speed of ResNet-18 by 2×, both with less than 0.6% top-5 accuracy loss. * These authors contributed equally. The above shortcomings prompts the question: why should we prune by static importance, if the importance is highly input-dependent? Surely, a more promising alternative is to prune dynamically depending on the current input. A dynamic channel pruning strategy allows the network to learn to prioritize certain convolutional channels and ignore irrelevant ones. Instead of simply reducing model size at the cost of accuracy with pruning, we can accelerate convolution by selectively computing only a subset of channels predicted to be important at run-time, while considering the sparse input from the preceding convolution layer. By doing this, not only do we save computational resources, we also preserve all neurons of the full model, which minimizes the impact on model accuracy.
Recently, a feature boosting and suppression method REF was used to skip unimportant convolutional output channels at runtime .
Dynamic Channel Pruning: Feature Boosting and Suppression
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Computer Science