  This paper presents an efficient technique to prune deep and/or wide
convolutional neural network models by eliminating redundant features (or
filters). Previous studies have shown that over-sized deep neural network
models tend to produce a lot of redundant features that are either shifted
version of one another or are very similar and show little or no variations;
thus resulting in filtering redundancy. We propose to prune these redundant
features along with their connecting feature maps according to their
differentiation and based on their relative cosine distances in the feature
space, thus yielding smaller network size with reduced inference costs and
competitive performance. We empirically show on select models and CIFAR-10
dataset that inference costs can be reduced by 40% for VGG-16, 27% for
ResNet-56, and 39% for ResNet-110.
