# Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.03415 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03415/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [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)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.03635/) (2018)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [DARTS: Differentiable Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.09055/) (2018)
- [Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01578/) (2016)
- [Self-training with Noisy Student improves ImageNet classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04252/) (2019)
- [ShuffleNet: An Extremely Efficient Convolutional Neural Network for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01083/) (2017)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [Learning Transferable Architectures for Scalable Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.07012/) (2017)
- [Designing Network Design Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.13678/) (2020)
- [MnasNet: Platform-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Mobile](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.11626/) (2018)
- [Regularized Evolution for Image Classifier Architecture Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01548/) (2018)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [Efficient Neural Architecture Search via Parameter Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03268/) (2018)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [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)
- [ProxylessNAS: Direct Neural Architecture Search on Target Task and Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00332/) (2018)
- [Rethinking the Value of Network Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.05270/) (2018)
- [BranchyNet: Fast Inference via Early Exiting from Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01686/) (2017)
- [Adaptive Computation Time for Recurrent Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.08983/) (2016)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [Soft Filter Pruning for Accelerating Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06866/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Slimmable Neural Networks (S-Net) is a novel network which enabled to select one of the predefined proportions of channels (sub-network) dynamically depending on the current computational resource availability. The accuracy of each sub-network on S-Net, however, is inferior to that of individually trained networks of the same size due to its difficulty of simultaneous optimization on different sub-networks. In this paper, we propose Slimmable Pruned Neural Networks (SP-Net), which has sub-network structures learned by pruning instead of adopting structures with the same proportion of channels in each layer (width multiplier) like S-Net, and we also propose new pruning procedures: multi-base pruning instead of one-shot or iterative pruning to realize high accuracy and huge training time saving. We also introduced slimmable channel sorting (scs) to achieve calculation as fast as S-Net and zero padding match (zpm) pruning to prune residual structure in more efficient way. SP-Net can be combined with any kind of channel pruning methods and does not require any complicated processing or time-consuming architecture search like NAS models. Compared with each sub-network of the same FLOPs on S-Net, SP-Net improves accuracy by 1.2-1.5% for ResNet-50, 0.9-4.4% for VGGNet, 1.3-2.7% for MobileNetV1, 1.4-3.1% for MobileNetV2 on ImageNet. Furthermore, our methods outperform other SOTA pruning methods and are on par with various NAS models according to our experimental results on ImageNet. The code is available at https://github.com/hideakikuratsu/SP-Net.