  Model compression techniques reduce the computational load and memory
consumption of deep neural networks. After the compression operation, e.g.
parameter pruning, the model is normally fine-tuned on the original training
dataset to recover from the performance drop caused by compression. However,
the training data is not always available due to privacy issues or other
factors. In this work, we present a data-free fine-tuning approach for pruning
the backbone of deep neural networks. In particular, the pruned network
backbone is trained with synthetically generated images, and our proposed
intermediate supervision to mimic the unpruned backbone's output feature map.
Afterwards, the pruned backbone can be combined with the original network head
to make predictions. We generate synthetic images by back-propagating gradients
to noise images while relying on L1-pruning for the backbone pruning. In our
experiments, we show that our approach is task-independent due to pruning only
the backbone. By evaluating our approach on 2D human pose estimation, object
detection, and image classification, we demonstrate promising performance
compared to the unpruned model. Our code is available at
https://github.com/holzbock/dfbf.
