Efficient Layer Compression Without Pruning

Network pruning is one of the chief means for improving the computational efficiency of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Pruning-based methods generally discard network kernels, channels, or layers, which however inevitably will disrupt original well-learned network correlation and thus lead to performance degeneration. In this work, we propose an Efficient Layer Compression (ELC) approach to efficiently compress serial layers by decoupling and merging rather than pruning. Specifically, we first propose a novel decoupling module to decouple the layers, enabling us readily merge serial layers that include both nonlinear and convolutional layers. Then, the decoupled network is losslessly merged based on the equivalent conversion of the parameters. In this way, our ELC can effectively reduce the depth of the network without destroying the correlation of the convolutional layers. To our best knowledge, we are the first to exploit the mergeability of serial convolutional layers for lossless network layer compression. Experimental results conducted on two datasets demonstrate that our method retains superior performance with a FLOPs reduction of 74.1% for VGG-16 and 54.6% for ResNet-56, respectively. In addition, our ELC improves the inference speed by $2\times $ on Jetson AGX Xavier edge device.