FGGP: Fixed-Rate Gradient-First Gradual Pruning

In recent years, the increasing size of deep learning models and their growing demand for computational resources have drawn significant attention to the practice of pruning neural networks, while aiming to preserve their accuracy. In unstructured gradual pruning, which sparsifies a network by gradually removing individual network parameters until a targeted network sparsity is reached, recent works show that both gradient and weight magnitudes should be considered. In this work, we show that such mechanism, e.g., the order of prioritization and selection criteria, is essential. We introduce a gradient-first magnitude-next strategy for choosing the parameters to prune, and show that a fixed-rate subselection criterion between these steps works better, in contrast to the annealing approach in the literature. We validate this on CIFAR-10 dataset, with multiple randomized initializations on both VGG-19 and ResNet-50 network backbones, for pruning targets of 90, 95, and 98% sparsity and for both initially dense and 50% sparse networks. Our proposed fixed-rate gradient-first gradual pruning (FGGP) approach outperforms its state-of-the-art alternatives in most of the above experimental settings, even occasionally surpassing the upperbound of corresponding dense network results, and having the highest ranking across the considered experimental settings.

HDRfeat: A Feature-Rich Network for High Dynamic Range Image Reconstruction

A major challenge for high dynamic range (HDR) image reconstruction from multi-exposed low dynamic range (LDR) images, especially with dynamic scenes, is the extraction and merging of relevant contextual features in order to suppress any ghosting and blurring artifacts from moving objects. To tackle this, in this work we propose a novel network for HDR reconstruction with deep and rich feature extraction layers, including residual attention blocks with sequential channel and spatial attention. For the compression of the rich-features to the HDR domain, a residual feature distillation block (RFDB) based architecture is adopted. In contrast to earlier deep-learning methods for HDR, the above contributions shift focus from merging/compression to feature extraction, the added value of which we demonstrate with ablation experiments. We present qualitative and quantitative comparisons on a public benchmark dataset, showing that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art.