Channel pruning has been identified as an effective approach to constructing efficient network structures. Its typical pipeline requires iterative pruning and fine-tuning. In this work, we propose a novel single-shot channel pruning approach based on alternating direction methods of multipliers (ADMM), which can eliminate the need for complex iterative pruning and fine-tuning procedure and achieve a target compression ratio with only one run of pruning and fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of single-shot channel pruning. The proposed method introduces filter-level sparsity during training and can achieve competitive performance with a simple heuristic pruning criterion (L1-norm). Extensive evaluations have been conducted with various widely-used benchmark architectures and image datasets for object classification purpose. The experimental results on classification accuracy show that the proposed method can outperform state-of-the-art network pruning works under various scenarios.
@article{arxiv.1902.06382,
title = {Single-shot Channel Pruning Based on Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers},
author = {Chengcheng Li and Zi Wang and Xiangyang Wang and Hairong Qi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.06382},
year = {2019}
}