Momentum Contrastive Pruning

Momentum contrast [16] (MoCo) for unsupervised visual representation learning has a close performance to supervised learning, but it sometimes possesses excess parameters. Extracting a subnetwork from an over-parameterized unsupervised network without sacrificing performance is of particular interest to accelerate inference speed. Typical pruning methods are not applicable for MoCo, because in the fine-tune stage after pruning, the slow update of the momentum encoder will undermine the pretrained encoder. In this paper, we propose a Momentum Contrastive Pruning (MCP) method, which prunes the momentum encoder instead to obtain a momentum subnet. It maintains an un-pruned momentum encoder as a smooth transition scheme to alleviate the representation gap between the encoder and momentum subnet. To fulfill the sparsity requirements of the encoder, alternating direction method of multipliers [40] (ADMM) is adopted. Experiments prove that our MCP method can obtain a momentum subnet that has almost equal performance as the over-parameterized MoCo when transferred to downstream tasks, meanwhile has much less parameters and float operations per second (FLOPs).