Shallowing deep networks: Layer-wise pruning based on feature representations

Recent surge of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has brought successes among various applications. However, these successes are accompanied by a significant increase in computational cost and the demand for computational resources, which critically hampers the utilization of complex CNNs on devices with limited computational power. In this work, we propose a feature representation based layer-wise pruning method that aims at reducing complex CNNs to more compact ones with equivalent performance. Different from previous parameter pruning methods that conduct connection-wise or filter-wise pruning based on weight information, our method determines redundant parameters by investigating the features learned in the convolutional layers and the pruning process is operated at a layer level. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is able to significantly reduce computational cost and the pruned models achieve equivalent or even better performance compared to the original models on various datasets.