Methods, systems, and media for random semi-structured row-wise pruning in neural networks

Abstract

Methods, systems and media for random semi-structured row-wise pruning of filters of a convolutional neural network are described. Rows of weights are pruned from kernels of filters of a convolutional layer of a convolutional neural network according to a pseudo-randomly-generated row pruning mask. The convolutional neural network is trained to perform a particular task using the pruned filters that include the rows of weights that have not been pruned from the kernels of filters. The process may be repeated multiple times, with the best-performing row pruning mask being selected for use in pruning row weights from kernel filters when the trained convolutional neural network is deployed to processing system and used for an inference. Computation time may be decreased further with the use of multiple parallel hardware computation units of a processing system performing pipelined row-wise convolution.