Auto-ML pruning methods aim at searching a pruning strategy automatically to reduce the computational complexity of deep Convolutional Neural Networks(deep CNNs). However, some previous works found that the results of many Auto-ML pruning methods even cannot surpass the results of the uniformly pruning method. In this paper, we first analyze the reason for the ineffectiveness of Auto-ML pruning. Subsequently, a stage-wise pruning(SP) method is proposed to solve the above problem. As with most of the previous Auto-ML pruning methods, SP also trains a super-net that can provide proxy performance for sub-nets and search the best sub-net who has the best proxy performance. Different from previous works, we split a deep CNN into several stages and use a full-net where all layers are not pruned to supervise the training and the searching of sub-nets. Remarkably, the proxy performance of sub-nets trained with SP is closer to the actual performance than most of the previous Auto-ML pruning works. Therefore, SP achieves the state-of-the-art on both CIFAR-10 and ImageNet under the mobile setting.
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