  Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have a large number of parameters and
take significantly large hardware resources to compute, so edge devices
struggle to run high-level networks. This paper proposes a novel method to
reduce the parameters and FLOPs for computational efficiency in deep learning
models. We introduce accuracy and efficiency coefficients to control the
trade-off between the accuracy of the network and its computing efficiency. The
proposed Rewarded meta-pruning algorithm trains a network to generate weights
for a pruned model chosen based on the approximate parameters of the final
model by controlling the interactions using a reward function. The reward
function allows more control over the metrics of the final pruned model.
Extensive experiments demonstrate superior performances of the proposed method
over the state-of-the-art methods in pruning ResNet-50, MobileNetV1, and
MobileNetV2 networks.
