  Parameter pruning is a promising approach for CNN compression and
acceleration by eliminating redundant model parameters with tolerable
performance degrade. Despite its effectiveness, existing regularization-based
parameter pruning methods usually drive weights towards zero with large and
constant regularization factors, which neglects the fragility of the
expressiveness of CNNs, and thus calls for a more gentle regularization scheme
so that the networks can adapt during pruning. To achieve this, we propose a
new and novel regularization-based pruning method, named IncReg, to
incrementally assign different regularization factors to different weights
based on their relative importance. Empirical analysis on CIFAR-10 dataset
verifies the merits of IncReg. Further extensive experiments with popular CNNs
on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet datasets show that IncReg achieves comparable to even
better results compared with state-of-the-arts. Our source codes and trained
models are available here: https://github.com/mingsun-tse/caffe_increg.
