Campfire: Compressable, Regularization-Free, Structured Sparse Training for Hardware Accelerators
This paper studies structured sparse training of CNNs with a gradual pruning technique that leads to fixed, sparse weight matrices after a set number of epochs. We simplify the structure of the enforced sparsity so that it reduces overhead caused by regularization. The proposed training methodology Campfire explores pruning at granularities within a convolutional kernel and filter. We study various tradeoffs with respect to pruning duration, level of sparsity, and learning rate configuration. We show that our method creates a sparse version of ResNet-50 and ResNet-50 v1.5 on full ImageNet while remaining within a negligible <1 sparse training does not harm the robustness of the network, we also demonstrate how the network behaves in the presence of adversarial attacks. Our results show that with 70 achievable.
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