Automatic Compression of Neural Network with Deep Reinforcement Learning Based on Proximal Gradient Method

In recent years, the model compression technique is very effective for deep neural network compression. However, many existing model compression methods rely heavily on human experience to explore a compression strategy between network structure, speed, and accuracy, which is usually suboptimal and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose a framework for automatically compressing models through the actor–critic structured deep reinforcement learning (DRL) which interacts with each layer in the neural network, where the actor network determines the compression strategy and the critic network ensures the decision accuracy of the actor network through predicted values, thus improving the compression quality of the network. To enhance the prediction performance of the critic network, we impose the L 1 norm regularizer on the weights of the critic network to obtain a distinct activation output feature on the representation, thus enhancing the prediction accuracy of the critic network. Moreover, to improve the decision performance of the actor network, we impose the L 1 norm regularizer on the weights of the actor network to improve the decision accuracy of the actor network by removing the redundant weights in the actor network. Furthermore, to improve the training efficiency, we use the proximal gradient method to optimize the weights of the actor network and the critic network, which can obtain an effective weight solution and thus improve the compression performance. In the experiment, in MNIST datasets, the proposed method has only a 0.2% loss of accuracy when compressing more than 70% of neurons. Similarly, in CIFAR-10 datasets, the proposed method compresses more than 60% of neurons, with only 7.1% accuracy loss, which is superior to other existing methods. In terms of efficiency, the proposed method also cost the lowest time among the existing methods.