Pruner.md

Pruner on NNI Compressor
===

## Level Pruner

This is one basic pruner: you can set a target sparsity level (expressed as a fraction, 0.6 means we will prune 60%). 

We first sort the weights in the specified layer by their absolute values. And then mask to zero the smallest magnitude weights until the desired sparsity level is reached.

### Usage

Tensorflow code
```
from nni.compression.tensorflow import LevelPruner
config_list = [{ 'sparsity': 0.8, 'op_types': ['default'] }]
pruner = LevelPruner(model_graph, config_list)
pruner.compress()
```

PyTorch code
```
from nni.compression.torch import LevelPruner
config_list = [{ 'sparsity': 0.8, 'op_types': ['default'] }]
pruner = LevelPruner(model, config_list)
pruner.compress()
```

#### User configuration for Level Pruner
* **sparsity:** This is to specify the sparsity operations to be compressed to

***

## AGP Pruner
In [To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression](https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.01878), authors Michael Zhu and Suyog Gupta provide an algorithm to prune the weight gradually.

>We introduce a new automated gradual pruning algorithm in which the sparsity is increased from an initial sparsity value si (usually 0) to a final sparsity value sf over a span of n pruning steps, starting at training step t0 and with pruning frequency ∆t:
![](../../img/agp_pruner.png)
>The binary weight masks are updated every ∆t steps as the network is trained to gradually increase the sparsity of the network while allowing the network training steps to recover from any pruning-induced loss in accuracy. In our experience, varying the pruning frequency ∆t between 100 and 1000 training steps had a negligible impact on the final model quality. Once the model achieves the target sparsity sf , the weight masks are no longer updated. The intuition behind this sparsity function in equation

### Usage
You can prune all weight from 0% to 80% sparsity in 10 epoch with the code below.

First, you should import pruner and add mask to model.

Tensorflow code
```python
from nni.compression.tensorflow import AGP_Pruner
config_list = [{
    'initial_sparsity': 0,
    'final_sparsity': 0.8,
    'start_epoch': 0,
    'end_epoch': 10,
    'frequency': 1,
    'op_types': 'default'
}]
pruner = AGP_Pruner(tf.get_default_graph(), config_list)
pruner.compress()
```
PyTorch code
```python
from nni.compression.torch import AGP_Pruner
config_list = [{
    'initial_sparsity': 0,
    'final_sparsity': 0.8,
    'start_epoch': 0,
    'end_epoch': 10,
    'frequency': 1,
    'op_types': 'default'
}]
pruner = AGP_Pruner(model, config_list)
pruner.compress()
```

Second, you should add code below to update epoch number when you finish one epoch in your training code.

Tensorflow code 
```python
pruner.update_epoch(epoch, sess)
```
PyTorch code
```python
pruner.update_epoch(epoch)
```
You can view example for more information

#### User configuration for AGP Pruner
* **initial_sparsity:** This is to specify the sparsity when compressor starts to compress
* **final_sparsity:** This is to specify the sparsity when compressor finishes to compress
* **start_epoch:** This is to specify the epoch number when compressor starts to compress, default start from epoch 0
* **end_epoch:** This is to specify the epoch number when compressor finishes to compress
* **frequency:** This is to specify every *frequency* number epochs compressor compress once, default frequency=1

***

## Lottery Ticket Hypothesis
[The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis: Finding Sparse, Trainable Neural Networks](https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.03635), authors Jonathan Frankle and Michael Carbin,provides comprehensive measurement and analysis, and articulate the *lottery ticket hypothesis*: dense, randomly-initialized, feed-forward networks contain subnetworks (*winning tickets*) that -- when trained in isolation -- reach test accuracy comparable to the original network in a similar number of iterations.

In this paper, the authors use the following process to prune a model, called *iterative prunning*:
>1. Randomly initialize a neural network f(x;theta_0) (where theta_0 follows D_{theta}).
>2. Train the network for j iterations, arriving at parameters theta_j.
>3. Prune p% of the parameters in theta_j, creating a mask m.
>4. Reset the remaining parameters to their values in theta_0, creating the winning ticket f(x;m*theta_0).
>5. Repeat step 2, 3, and 4.

If the configured final sparsity is P (e.g., 0.8) and there are n times iterative pruning, each iterative pruning prunes 1-(1-P)^(1/n) of the weights that survive the previous round.

### Usage

PyTorch code
```python
from nni.compression.torch import LotteryTicketPruner
config_list = [{
    'prune_iterations': 5,
    'sparsity': 0.8,
    'op_types': ['default']
}]
pruner = LotteryTicketPruner(model, config_list, optimizer)
pruner.compress()
for _ in pruner.get_prune_iterations():
    pruner.prune_iteration_start()
    for epoch in range(epoch_num):
        ...
```

The above configuration means that there are 5 times of iterative pruning. As the 5 times iterative pruning are executed in the same run, LotteryTicketPruner needs `model` and `optimizer` (**Note that should add `lr_scheduler` if used**) to reset their states every time a new prune iteration starts. Please use `get_prune_iterations` to get the pruning iterations, and invoke `prune_iteration_start` at the beginning of each iteration. `epoch_num` is better to be large enough for model convergence, because the hypothesis is that the performance (accuracy) got in latter rounds with high sparsity could be comparable with that got in the first round. Simple reproducing results can be found [here](./LotteryTicketHypothesis.md).


*Tensorflow version will be supported later.*

#### User configuration for LotteryTicketPruner

* **prune_iterations:** The number of rounds for the iterative pruning, i.e., the number of iterative pruning.
* **sparsity:** The final sparsity when the compression is done.

***
## FPGM Pruner
FPGM Pruner is an implementation of paper [Filter Pruning via Geometric Median for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks Acceleration](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.00250.pdf)

>Previous works utilized “smaller-norm-less-important” criterion to prune filters with smaller norm values in a convolutional neural network. In this paper, we analyze this norm-based criterion and point out that its effectiveness depends on two requirements that are not always met: (1) the norm deviation of the filters should be large; (2) the minimum norm of the filters should be small. To solve this problem, we propose a novel filter pruning method, namely Filter Pruning via Geometric Median (FPGM), to compress the model regardless of those two requirements. Unlike previous methods, FPGM compresses CNN models by pruning filters with redundancy, rather than those with “relatively less” importance.

### Usage
First, you should import pruner and add mask to model.

Tensorflow code
```python
from nni.compression.tensorflow import FPGMPruner
config_list = [{
    'sparsity': 0.5,
    'op_types': ['Conv2D']
}]
pruner = FPGMPruner(model, config_list)
pruner.compress()
```
PyTorch code
```python
from nni.compression.torch import FPGMPruner
config_list = [{
    'sparsity': 0.5,
    'op_types': ['Conv2d']
}]
pruner = FPGMPruner(model, config_list)
pruner.compress()
```
Note: FPGM Pruner is used to prune convolutional layers within deep neural networks, therefore the `op_types` field supports only convolutional layers.

Second, you should add code below to update epoch number at beginning of each epoch.

Tensorflow code
```python
pruner.update_epoch(epoch, sess)
```
PyTorch code
```python
pruner.update_epoch(epoch)
```
You can view example for more information

#### User configuration for FPGM Pruner
* **sparsity:** How much percentage of convolutional filters are to be pruned.

***