Application-Specific Component-Aware Structured Pruning of Deep Neural Networks via Soft Coefficient Optimization

Deep neural networks (DNNs) offer significant versatility and performance benefits, but their widespread adoption is often hindered by high model complexity and computational demands. Model compression techniques such as pruning have emerged as promising solutions to these challenges. However, it remains critical to ensure that application-specific performance characteristics are preserved during compression. In structured pruning, where groups of structurally coherent elements are removed, conventional importance metrics frequently fail to maintain these essential performance attributes. In this work, we propose an enhanced importance metric framework that not only reduces model size but also explicitly accounts for application-specific performance constraints. We employ multiple strategies to determine the optimal pruning magnitude for each group, ensuring a balance between compression and task performance. Our approach is evaluated on an autoencoder tasked with reconstructing MNIST images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method effectively preserves task-relevant performance, maintaining the model's usability even after substantial pruning, by satisfying the required application-specific criteria.