On the Channel Pruning using Graph Convolution Network for Convolutional Neural Network Acceleration

Network pruning is considered efficient for sparsification and acceleration of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based models that can be adopted in re-source-constrained environments. Inspired by two popular pruning criteria, i.e. magnitude and similarity, this paper proposes a novel structural pruning method based on Graph Convolution Network (GCN) to further promote compression performance. The channel features are firstly extracted by Global Average Pooling (GAP) from a batch of samples, and a graph model for each layer is generated based on the similarity of features. A set of agents for individual CNN layers are implemented by GCN and utilized to synthesize comprehensive channel information and determine the pruning scheme for the overall CNN model. The training process of each agent is carried out using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to ensure their convergence and adaptability to various network architectures. The proposed solution is assessed based on a range of image classification datasets i.e., CIFAR and Tiny-ImageNet. The numerical results indicate that the proposed pruning method outperforms the pure magnitude-based or similarity-based pruning solutions and other SOTA methods (e.g., HRank and SCP). For example, the proposed method can prune VGG16 by removing 93% of the model parameters without any accuracy reduction in the CIFAR10 dataset.