Regularization-Free Structural Pruning for GPU Inference Acceleration

Pruning is recently prevalent in deep neural network compression to save memory footprint and accelerate network inference. Unstructured pruning, i.e., fine-grained pruning, helps preserve model accuracy, while structural pruning, i.e., coarse-grained pruning, is preferred for general-purpose platforms such as GPUs. This paper proposes a regularization-free structural pruning scheme to take advantage of both unstructured and structural pruning by heuristically mixing vector-wise fine-grained and block-wise coarse-grained pruning masks with an AND operation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposal can achieve higher model accuracy and higher sparsity ratio of VGG-16 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 compared with commonly applied block and balanced sparsity.