Growing Efficient Deep Networks by Structured Continuous Sparsification

We develop an approach to training deep networks while dynamically adjusting their architecture, driven by a principled combination of accuracy and sparsity objectives. Unlike conventional pruning approaches, our method adopts a gradual continuous relaxation of discrete network structure optimization and then samples sparse subnetworks, enabling efficient deep networks to be trained in a growing and pruning manner. Extensive experiments across CIFAR-10, ImageNet, PASCAL VOC, and Penn Treebank, with convolutional models for image classification and semantic segmentation, and recurrent models for language modeling, show that our training scheme yields efficient networks that are smaller and more accurate than those produced by competing pruning methods.