Cluster-Based Structural Redundancy Identification for Neural Network Compression

The increasingly large structure of neural networks makes it difficult to deploy on edge devices with limited computing resources. Network pruning has become one of the most successful model compression methods in recent years. Existing works typically compress models based on importance, removing unimportant filters. This paper reconsiders model pruning from the perspective of structural redundancy, claiming that identifying functionally similar filters plays a more important role, and proposes a model pruning framework for clustering-based redundancy identification. First, we perform cluster analysis on the filters of each layer to generate similar sets with different functions. We then propose a criterion for identifying redundant filters within similar sets. Finally, we propose a pruning scheme that automatically determines the pruning rate of each layer. Extensive experiments on various benchmark network architectures and datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.