Task-Level Customized Pruning for Image Classification on Edge Devices

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are widely utilized in image classification. Nevertheless, CNNs typically require substantial computational resources, posing challenges for deployment on resource-constrained edge devices and limiting the spread of AI-driven applications. While various pruning approaches have been proposed to mitigate this issue, they often overlook a critical fact that edge devices are typically tasked with handling only a subset of classes rather than the entire set. Moreover, the specific combinations of subcategories that each device must discern vary, highlighting the need for fine-grained task-specific adjustments. Unfortunately, these oversights result in pruned models that still contain unnecessary category redundancies, thereby impeding the potential for further model optimization and lightweight design. To bridge this gap, we propose a task-level customized pruning (TLCP) method via utilizing task-level information, i.e., class combination information relevant to edge devices. Specifically, TLCP first introduces channel control gates to assess the importance of each convolutional channel for individual classes. These class-level control gates are then aggregated through linear combinations, resulting in a pruned model customized to the specific tasks of edge devices. Experiments on various customized tasks demonstrate that TLCP can significantly reduce the number of parameters, by up to 33.9% on CIFAR-10 and 14.0% on CIFAR-100, compared to other baseline methods, while maintaining almost the same inference accuracy.