Deep Neural Network Compression by In-Parallel Pruning-Quantization.

Deep neural networks enable state-of-the-art accuracy on visual recognition tasks such as image classification and object detection. However, modern networks contain millions of learned connections, and the current trend is towards deeper and more densely connected architectures. This poses a challenge to the deployment of state-of-the-art networks on resource-constrained systems, such as smartphones or mobile robots. In general, a more efficient utilization of computation resources would assist in deployment scenarios from embedded platforms to computing clusters running ensembles of networks. In this paper, we propose a deep network compression algorithm that performs weight pruning and quantization jointly, and in parallel with fine-tuning. Our approach takes advantage of the complementary nature of pruning and quantization and recovers from premature pruning errors, which is not possible with two-stage approaches. In experiments on ImageNet, CLIP-Q (Compression Learning by In-Parallel Pruning-Quantization) improves the state-of-the-art in network compression on AlexNet, VGGNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet. We additionally demonstrate that CLIP-Q is complementary to efficient network architecture design by compressing MobileNet and ShuffleNet, and that CLIP-Q generalizes beyond convolutional networks by compressing a memory network for visual question answering.