BRIEF: Backward Reduction of CNNs with Information Flow Analysis

Abstract--This paper proposes BRIEF, a backward reduction algorithm that explores compact CNN-model designs from the information flow perspective. This algorithm can remove substantial nonzero weighting parameters (redundant neural channels) of a network by considering its dynamic behavior, which traditional model-compaction techniques cannot achieve. With the aid of our proposed algorithm, we achieve significant model reduction on ResNet-34 in the ImageNet scale (32.3% reduction), which is 3 better than the previous result (10.8%). Even for highly optimized models such as SqueezeNet and MobileNet, we can achieve additional 10.81% and 37.56% reduction, respectively, with negligible performance degradation. Since the breakthrough performance demonstrated by convolutional neural networks (CNNs) on ImageNet, deep architecture has been successfully applied to a number of areas such as speech recognition, object tracking, and image classification. As the width and depth of a CNN is increased to improve prediction accuracy, the model complexity and training time increase as well. Whereas model training can be sped up by employing a large number of GPUs, inferencing on mobile and wearable devices (e.g., mobile VR) faces the resource limitations of memory, power and computation. In this work, we utilize information flow analysis to perform CNN model reduction while preserving prediction accuracy. Traditionally, a complex CNN is simplified for embedded systems by using the teacher-student model [1], [2].