Network Compression via Recursive Bayesian Pruning

Recently, compression and acceleration of deep neural networks are in critic need. Bayesian generalization of structured pruning represents an important research direction to solve the above problem. However, the existing Bayesian methods ignore the dependency among neurons and filters for computational simplicity. In this study, we explore, under Bayesian framework, a structured pruning method with layer-wise sequential dependency assumed, a more general learning setting. Based on the property of Dirac distribution, we further derive a new dropout noise, which makes it possible to approximate the posterior of dropout noise knowing that of the previous layer. With the Dirac-like dropout noise, we further propose a recursive strategy, named \emph{Recursive Bayesian Pruning} (RBP), to train and prune networks in a layer-by-layer fashion. The unimportant neurons and filters are directly targeted and removed, taking the influence from the previous layer. Experiments on typical neural networks LeNet-300-100, LeNet-5 and VGG-16 have demonstrated the proposed method are competitive with or even outperform the state-of-the-art methods in several compression and acceleration metrics.