Previous AutoML pruning works utilized individual layer features to automatically prune filters. We analyze the correlation for two layers from different blocks which have a short-cut structure. It is found that, in one block, the deeper layer has many redundant filters which can be represented by filters in the former layer so that it is necessary to take information from other layers into consideration in pruning. In this paper, a graph pruning approach is proposed, which views any deep model as a topology graph. Graph PruningNet based on the graph convolution network is designed to automatically extract neighboring information for each node. To extract features from various topologies, Graph PruningNet is connected with Pruned Network by an individual fully connection layer for each node and jointly trained on a training dataset from scratch. Thus, we can obtain reasonable weights for any size of sub-network. We then search the best configuration of the Pruned Network by reinforcement learning. Different from previous work, we take the node features from well-trained Graph PruningNet, instead of the hand-craft features, as the states in reinforcement learning. Compared with other AutoML pruning works, our method has achieved the state-of-the-art under same conditions on ImageNet-2012. The code will be released on GitHub.
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