# Model Pruning Based on Quantified Similarity of Feature Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06052 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06052/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 38 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.00915/) (2016)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking with a Deep Association Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07402/) (2017)
- [Simple Online and Realtime Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.00763/) (2016)
- [SNIP: Single-shot Network Pruning based on Connection Sensitivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.02340/) (2018)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Learning Efficient Convolutional Networks through Network Slimming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.06519/) (2017)
- [GhostNet: More Features from Cheap Operations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11907/) (2019)
- [AMC: AutoML for Model Compression and Acceleration on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03494/) (2018)
- [HRank: Filter Pruning using High-Rank Feature Map](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10179/) (2020)
- [NISP: Pruning Networks using Neuron Importance Score Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05908/) (2017)
- [Towards Fast, Accurate and Stable 3D Dense Face Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.09960/) (2020)
- [Trained Ternary Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.01064/) (2016)
- [Proving the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Pruning is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00585/) (2020)
- [Data-Driven Sparse Structure Selection for Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01213/) (2017)
- [Towards Optimal Structured CNN Pruning via Generative Adversarial Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.09291/) (2019)
- [Regressing Robust and Discriminative 3D Morphable Models with a very Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.04904/) (2016)
- [Channel Pruning via Automatic Structure Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08565/) (2020)
- [Edge Intelligence: The Confluence of Edge Computing and Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.00560/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Token Transforming: A Unified and Training-Free Token Compression Framework for Vision Transformer Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05709/) (2025)
- [Network Pruning via Feature Shift Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.02632/) (2022)
- [Discriminative Feature Learning through Feature Distance Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11606/) (2022)
- [Self Similarity Matrix based CNN Filter Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01814/) (2022)
- [LNPT: Label-free Network Pruning and Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12690/) (2024)
- [IPPRO: Importance-based Pruning with PRojective Offset for Magnitude-indifferent Structural Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.14171/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) has been applied in numerous Internet of Things (IoT) devices for multifarious downstream tasks. However, with the increasing amount of data on edge devices, CNNs can hardly complete some tasks in time with limited computing and storage resources. Recently, filter pruning has been regarded as an effective technique to compress and accelerate CNNs, but existing methods rarely prune CNNs from the perspective of compressing high-dimensional tensors. In this paper, we propose a novel theory to find redundant information in three-dimensional tensors, namely Quantified Similarity between Feature Maps (QSFM), and utilize this theory to guide the filter pruning procedure. We perform QSFM on datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ILSVRC-12) and edge devices, demonstrate that the proposed method can find the redundant information in the neural networks effectively with comparable compression and tolerable drop of accuracy. Without any fine-tuning operation, QSFM can compress ResNet-56 on CIFAR-10 significantly (48.7% FLOPs and 57.9% parameters are reduced) with only a loss of 0.54% in the top-1 accuracy. For the practical application of edge devices, QSFM can accelerate MobileNet-V2 inference speed by 1.53 times with only a loss of 1.23% in the ILSVRC-12 top-1 accuracy.