Synaptic Strength For Convolutional Neural Network

Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) are both computation and memory inten-sive which hindered their deployment in mobile devices. Inspired by the relevantconcept in neural science literature, we propose Synaptic Pruning: a data-drivenmethod to prune connections between input and output feature maps with a newlyproposed class of parameters called Synaptic Strength. Synaptic Strength is de-signed to capture the importance of a connection based on the amount of informa-tion it transports. Experiment results show the effectiveness of our approach. OnCIFAR-10, we prune connections for various CNN models with up to96%, whichresults in significant size reduction and computation saving.