SUBP: Soft Uniform Block Pruning for 1 \times N Sparse CNNs Multithreading Acceleration

The study of sparsity in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has become widespread to compress and accelerate models in environments with limited resources. By constraining N consecutive weights along the output channel to be group-wise non-zero, the recent network with 1$\times$N sparsity has received tremendous popularity for its three outstanding advantages: 1) A large amount of storage space saving by a \emph{Block Sparse Row} matrix.