Structured Compression of Deep Neural Networks with Debiased Elastic Group LASSO

State-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are typically too cumbersome to be practically useful in portable electronic devices. As such, several works pursue model compression that seeks to drastically reduce computational memory footprints, FLOPS and memory for storage. Many of these works achieve unstructured compression, where the compressed models are not directly useful since dedicated hardware and specialized algorithms are required for storage of sparse weights and fast sparse matrix-vector multi-plication respectively. In this paper, we propose structured compression of large DNNs using debiased elastic group LASSO (DEGL), which is motivated by different interesting characteristics of the individual components. That is, where group LASSO penalty enforces structured sparsity, l2-norm penalty promotes features grouping, and debiasing disentangles sparsity and shrinkage effects of group LASSO. We perform extensive experiments by applying DEGL to different DNN architectures including LeNet, VGG, AlexNet and ResNet on MNIST, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of our proposal on domain adaptation using Oxford-102 flower species and Food-5K datasets. Results show that DEGL can compress DNNs by several folds with small or no loss of performance. Particularly, DEGL outperforms conventional group LASSO and several other state-of-the-art methods that perform structured compression.