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Pruning/Sparsity Tutorial

📚 This guide explains how to apply pruning to YOLOv5 🚀 models.

Before You Start

Clone repo and install requirements.txt in a Python>=3.8.0 environment, including PyTorch>=1.8. Models and datasets download automatically from the latest YOLOv5 release.

git clone https://github.com/ultralytics/yolov5  # clone
cd yolov5
pip install -r requirements.txt  # install

Test Normally

Before pruning we want to establish a baseline performance to compare to. This command tests YOLOv5x on COCO val2017 at image size 640 pixels. yolov5x.pt is the largest and most accurate model available. Other options are yolov5s.pt, yolov5m.pt and yolov5l.pt, or you own checkpoint from training a custom dataset ./weights/best.pt. For details on all available models please see our README table.

python val.py --weights yolov5x.pt --data coco.yaml --img 640 --half

Output:

val: data=/content/yolov5/data/coco.yaml, weights=['yolov5x.pt'], batch_size=32, imgsz=640, conf_thres=0.001, iou_thres=0.65, task=val, device=, workers=8, single_cls=False, augment=False, verbose=False, save_txt=False, save_hybrid=False, save_conf=False, save_json=True, project=runs/val, name=exp, exist_ok=False, half=True, dnn=False
YOLOv5 🚀 v6.0-224-g4c40933 torch 1.10.0+cu111 CUDA:0 (Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB, 16160MiB)

Fusing layers...
Model Summary: 444 layers, 86705005 parameters, 0 gradients
val: Scanning '/content/datasets/coco/val2017.cache' images and labels... 4952 found, 48 missing, 0 empty, 0 corrupt: 100% 5000/5000 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
               Class     Images     Labels          P          R     mAP@.5 mAP@.5:.95: 100% 157/157 [01:12<00:00,  2.16it/s]
                 all       5000      36335      0.732      0.628      0.683      0.496
Speed: 0.1ms pre-process, 5.2ms inference, 1.7ms NMS per image at shape (32, 3, 640, 640)  # <--- base speed

Evaluating pycocotools mAP... saving runs/val/exp2/yolov5x_predictions.json...
...
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.507  # <--- base mAP
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.689
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.75      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.552
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.345
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.559
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.652
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=  1 ] = 0.381
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets= 10 ] = 0.630
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.682
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.526
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.731
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.829
Results saved to runs/val/exp

Test YOLOv5x on COCO (0.30 sparsity)

We repeat the above test with a pruned model by using the torch_utils.prune() command. We update val.py to prune YOLOv5x to 0.3 sparsity:

Screenshot 2022-02-02 at 22 54 18

30% pruned output:

val: data=/content/yolov5/data/coco.yaml, weights=['yolov5x.pt'], batch_size=32, imgsz=640, conf_thres=0.001, iou_thres=0.65, task=val, device=, workers=8, single_cls=False, augment=False, verbose=False, save_txt=False, save_hybrid=False, save_conf=False, save_json=True, project=runs/val, name=exp, exist_ok=False, half=True, dnn=False
YOLOv5 🚀 v6.0-224-g4c40933 torch 1.10.0+cu111 CUDA:0 (Tesla V100-SXM2-16GB, 16160MiB)

Fusing layers...
Model Summary: 444 layers, 86705005 parameters, 0 gradients
Pruning model...  0.3 global sparsity
val: Scanning '/content/datasets/coco/val2017.cache' images and labels... 4952 found, 48 missing, 0 empty, 0 corrupt: 100% 5000/5000 [00:00<?, ?it/s]
               Class     Images     Labels          P          R     mAP@.5 mAP@.5:.95: 100% 157/157 [01:11<00:00,  2.19it/s]
                 all       5000      36335      0.724      0.614      0.671      0.478
Speed: 0.1ms pre-process, 5.2ms inference, 1.7ms NMS per image at shape (32, 3, 640, 640)  # <--- prune mAP

Evaluating pycocotools mAP... saving runs/val/exp3/yolov5x_predictions.json...
...
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.489  # <--- prune mAP
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.677
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.75      | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.537
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.334
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.542
 Average Precision  (AP) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.635
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=  1 ] = 0.370
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets= 10 ] = 0.612
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=   all | maxDets=100 ] = 0.664
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= small | maxDets=100 ] = 0.496
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area=medium | maxDets=100 ] = 0.722
 Average Recall     (AR) @[ IoU=0.50:0.95 | area= large | maxDets=100 ] = 0.803
Results saved to runs/val/exp3

In the results we can observe that we have achieved a sparsity of 30% in our model after pruning, which means that 30% of the model's weight parameters in nn.Conv2d layers are equal to 0. Inference time is essentially unchanged, while the model's AP and AR scores a slightly reduced.

Supported Environments

Ultralytics provides a range of ready-to-use environments, each pre-installed with essential dependencies such as CUDA, CUDNN, Python, and PyTorch, to kickstart your projects.

Project Status

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Created 2023-11-12, Updated 2023-12-03
Authors: glenn-jocher (2)

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