  We revisit the idea of brain damage, i.e. the pruning of the coefficients of
a neural network, and suggest how brain damage can be modified and used to
speedup convolutional layers. The approach uses the fact that many efficient
implementations reduce generalized convolutions to matrix multiplications. The
suggested brain damage process prunes the convolutional kernel tensor in a
group-wise fashion by adding group-sparsity regularization to the standard
training process. After such group-wise pruning, convolutions can be reduced to
multiplications of thinned dense matrices, which leads to speedup. In the
comparison on AlexNet, the method achieves very competitive performance.
