Storage Efficient and Dynamic Flexible Runtime Channel Pruning via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Jianda Chen, Shangyu Chen, Sinno Jialin Pan

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based framework to efficiently perform runtime channel pruning on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Our DRL-based framework aims to learn a pruning strategy to determine how many and which channels to be pruned in each convolutional layer, depending on each specific input instance in runtime. The learned policy optimizes the performance of the network by restricting the computational resource on layers under an overall computation budget. Furthermore, unlike other runtime pruning methods which require to store all channels parameters in inference, our framework can reduce parameters storage consumption at deployment by introducing a static pruning component. Comparison experimental results with existing runtime and static pruning methods on state-of-the-art CNNs demonstrate that our proposed framework is able to provide a tradeoff between dynamic flexibility and storage efficiency in runtime channel pruning.