Filter Contribution Recycle: Boosting Model Pruning with Small Norm Filters

Model pruning methods have attracted huge attention owing to the increasing demand of deploying models on low-resource devices recently. Most existing methods use the weight norm of filters to represent their importance, and discard the ones with small value directly to achieve the pruning target, which ignores the contribution of the small norm filters. This is not only results in filter contribution waste, but also gives comparable performance to training with the random initialized weights [1]. In this paper, we point out that the small norm filters can harm the performance of the pruned model greatly, if they are discarded directly. Therefore, we propose a novel filter contribution recycle (FCR) method for structured model pruning to resolve the fore-mentioned problem. FCR collects and reassembles contribution from the small norm filters to obtain a mixed contribution collector, and then assigns the reassembled contribution to other filters with higher probability to be preserved. To achieve the target FLOPs, FCR also adopts a weight decay strategy for the small norm filters. To explore the effectiveness of our approach, extensive experiments are conducted on ImageNet2012 and CIFAR-10 datasets, and superior results are reported when comparing with other methods under the same or even more FLOPs reduction. In addition, our method is flexible to be combined with other different pruning criterions.