### DropPruning for Model Compression

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have dramatically achieved great success on a variety of challenging tasks. However, most of the successful DNNs are structurally so complex, leading to much storage requirement and floating-point operation. This paper proposes a novel technique, named Drop Pruning, to compress the DNNs by pruning the weights from a dense high-accuracy baseline model without accuracy loss. Drop Pruning also falls into the standard iterative prune-retrain procedure, where a \emph{drop} strategy exists at each pruning step: \emph{drop out}, stochastic deleting some unimportant weights and \emph{drop in}, stochastic recovering some pruned weights. \emph{Drop out} and \emph{drop in} are supposed to handle the two drawbacks of the traditional pruning methods: local importance judgment and irretrievable pruning process, respectively. The suitable choosing of \emph{drop} probabilities can decrease the model size during pruning process and lead it to flow to the target sparsity. Drop Pruning also has some similar spirits with dropout, a stochastic algorithm in Integer Optimization and the Dense-Sparse-Dense training technique. Drop Pruning can significantly reducing overfitting while compressing the model. Experimental results demonstrates that Drop Pruning can achieve the state-of-the-art performance on many benchmark pruning tasks, about ${11.1\times}$ compression of VGG-16 on CIFAR10 and ${14.3\times}$ compression of LeNet-5 on MNIST without accuracy loss, which may provide some new insights into the aspect of model compression.

### Auto Deep Compression by Reinforcement Learning Based Actor-Critic Structure

Model-based compression is an effective, facilitating, and expanded model of neural network models with limited computing and low power. However, conventional models of compression techniques utilize crafted features [2,3,12] and explore specialized areas for exploration and design of large spaces in terms of size, speed, and accuracy, which usually have returns Less and time is up. This paper will effectively analyze deep auto compression (ADC) and reinforcement learning strength in an effective sample and space design, and improve the compression quality of the model. The results of compression of the advanced model are obtained without any human effort and in a completely automated way. With a 4- fold reduction in FLOP, the accuracy of 2.8% is higher than the manual compression model for VGG-16 in ImageNet.

### Effective Network Compression Using Simulation-Guided Iterative Pruning

Existing high-performance deep learning models require very intensive computing. For this reason, it is difficult to embed a deep learning model into a system with limited resources. In this paper, we propose the novel idea of the network compression as a method to solve this limitation. The principle of this idea is to make iterative pruning more effective and sophisticated by simulating the reduced network. A simple experiment was conducted to evaluate the method; the results showed that the proposed method achieved higher performance than existing methods at the same pruning level.

### Centripetal SGD for Pruning Very Deep Convolutional Networks with Complicated Structure

The redundancy is widely recognized in Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which enables to remove unimportant filters from convolutional layers so as to slim the network with acceptable performance drop. Inspired by the linear and combinational properties of convolution, we seek to make some filters increasingly close and eventually identical for network slimming. To this end, we propose Centripetal SGD (C-SGD), a novel optimization method, which can train several filters to collapse into a single point in the parameter hyperspace. When the training is completed, the removal of the identical filters can trim the network with NO performance loss, thus no finetuning is needed. By doing so, we have partly solved an open problem of constrained filter pruning on CNNs with complicated structure, where some layers must be pruned following others. Our experimental results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet have justified the effectiveness of C-SGD-based filter pruning. Moreover, we have provided empirical evidences for the assumption that the redundancy in deep neural networks helps the convergence of training by showing that a redundant CNN trained using C-SGD outperforms a normally trained counterpart with the equivalent width.

### HAKD: Hardware Aware Knowledge Distillation

Despite recent developments, deploying deep neural networks on resource constrained general purpose hardware remains a significant challenge. There has been much work in developing methods for reshaping neural networks, usually with a focus on minimising total parameter count. These methods are typically developed in a hardware-agnostic manner and do not exploit hardware behaviour. In this paper we propose a new approach, Hardware Aware Knowledge Distillation (HAKD) which uses empirical observations of hardware behaviour to design efficient student networks which are then trained with knowledge distillation. This allows the trade-off between accuracy and performance to be managed explicitly. We have applied this approach across three platforms and evaluated it on two networks, MobileNet and DenseNet, on CIFAR-10. We show that HAKD outperforms Deep Compression and Fisher pruning in terms of size, accuracy and performance.