# Model Compression using Progressive Channel Pruning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 37 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [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)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [MobileNets: Efficient Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Vision Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04861/) (2017)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Fast R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.08083/) (2015)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation by Backpropagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.7495/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Features with Deep Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02791/) (2015)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [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)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [Channel Pruning for Accelerating Very Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06168/) (2017)
- [Deep Domain Confusion: Maximizing for Domain Invariance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.3474/) (2014)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [AMC: AutoML for Model Compression and Acceleration on Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.03494/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Residual Transfer Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04433/) (2016)
- [Domain Separation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06019/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Pixel-Level Domain Adaptation with Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.05424/) (2016)
- [Exploiting Linear Structure Within Convolutional Networks for Efficient Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1404.0736/) (2014)
- [EIE: Efficient Inference Engine on Compressed Deep Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01528/) (2016)
- [Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.3866/) (2014)
- [NISP: Pruning Networks using Neuron Importance Score Propagation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05908/) (2017)
- [Network Trimming: A Data-Driven Neuron Pruning Approach towards Efficient Deep Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.03250/) (2016)
- [Coupled Generative Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.07536/) (2016)
- [Speeding-up Convolutional Neural Networks Using Fine-tuned CP-Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6553/) (2014)
- [Compressing Deep Convolutional Networks using Vector Quantization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6115/) (2014)
- [Compression of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks for Fast and Low Power Mobile Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06530/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [LLMC+: Benchmarking Vision-Language Model Compression with a Plug-and-play Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09981/) (2025)
- [SLMQuant:Benchmarking Small Language Model Quantization for Practical Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.13023/) (2025)
- [Which Layer Causes Distribution Deviation? Entropy-Guided Adaptive Pruning for Diffusion and Flow Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21122/) (2025)
- [Domain-Aware Pruning: Sparsity and Domain Generalization via Regularized Probabilistic Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.08624/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we propose a simple but effective channel pruning framework called Progressive Channel Pruning (PCP) to accelerate Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). In contrast to the existing channel pruning methods that prune channels only once per layer in a layer-by-layer fashion, our new progressive framework iteratively prunes a small number of channels from several selected layers, which consists of a three-step attempting-selecting-pruning pipeline in each iteration. In the attempting step, we attempt to prune a pre-defined number of channels from one layer by using any existing channel pruning methods and estimate the accuracy drop for this layer based on the labelled samples in the validation set. In the selecting step, based on the estimated accuracy drops for all layers, we propose a greedy strategy to automatically select a set of layers that will lead to less overall accuracy drop after pruning these layers. In the pruning step, we prune a small number of channels from these selected layers. We further extend our PCP framework to prune channels for the deep transfer learning methods like Domain Adversarial Neural Network (DANN), in which we effectively reduce the data distribution mismatch in the channel pruning process by using both labelled samples from the source domain and pseudo-labelled samples from the target domain. Our comprehensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our PCP framework outperforms the existing channel pruning approaches under both supervised learning and transfer learning settings.