A Proximal Iteratively Reweighted Approach for Efficient Network Sparsification

The huge size of deep neural networks makes it difficult to deploy on the embedded platforms with limited computation resources directly. In this article, we propose a novel trimming approach to determine the redundant parameters of the trained deep neural network in a layer-wise manner to produce a compact neural network. This is achieved by minimizing a nonconvex sparsity-inducing term of the network parameters while maintaining the response close to the original one. We present a proximal iteratively reweighted method to resolve the resulting nonconvex model, which approximates the nonconvex objective by a weighted l1 norm of the network parameters. Moreover, to alleviate the computational burden, we develop a novel termination criterion during the subproblem solution, significantly reducing the total pruning time. Global convergence analysis and a worst-case O(1/k) ergodic convergence rate for our proposed algorithm is established. Numerical experiments demonstrate the proposed approach is efficient and reliable.