We propose a new structured pruning framework for compressing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) with skip-connections, based on measuring the statistical dependency of hidden layers and predicted outputs. The dependence measure defined by the energy statistics of hidden layers serves as a model-free measure of information between the feature maps and the output of the network. The estimated dependence measure is subsequently used to prune a collection of redundant and uninformative layers. Extensive numerical experiments on various architectures show the efficacy of the proposed pruning approach with competitive performance to state-of-the-art methods.

In this paper, we propose a new structural technique for pruning deep neural networks with skip-connections. Our approach is based on measuring the importance of feature maps in predicting the output of the model using their Fisher scores. These scores subsequently used for removing the less informative layers from the graph of the network. Extensive experiments on the classification of CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and SVHN data sets demonstrate the efficacy of our compressing method both in the number of parameters and operations.