TEC-CNN: Towards Efficient Compressing Convolutional Neural Nets with Low-rank Tensor Decomposition

Most state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are characterised by excessive parameterisation, leading to a high computational burden. Tensor decomposition has emerged as a model reduction technique for compressing deep neural networks. Previous approaches have predominantly relied on either Tucker decomposition or Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition for CNNs. However, CP decomposition exhibits exceptional compression capabilities in comparison to Tucker decomposition, which results in a more pronounced accuracy loss. This paper introduces an efficient model compression method, termed TEC-CNN, designed to achieve significant compression while preserving accuracy levels comparable to those of the original models. In TEC-CNN, convolutional layers are identified to obtain convolutional kernels by analysing given models under the principles of low-rank tensor decomposition, and then, calculating the ranks of convolutional kernels. Furthermore, an efficient decomposition schema for the convolutional kernel is proposed with approximate kernel tensor for reducing parameters. Additionally, a novel format of a convolutional sequence is presented and constructed with a reduced number of parameters to replace the original convolutional layers. Finally, the effectiveness of TEC-CNN is assessed across a range of computer vision tasks. For instance, in CIFAR-100 classification, ResNet18 is compressed to 4.1 MB, while Unext, when applied to image segmentation using the International Skin Imaging Collaboration (ISIC) dataset, is reduced to 3.419 MB. When employed for fire object detection with Yolov7, TEC-CNN achieves a model size reduction of 71.6 MB. Comprehensive experimental results underscore that our approach achieves significant model compression while preserving model performance.