Pruning/Sparsity Tutorial

[glenn-jocher]

📚 This guide explains how to apply pruning to YOLOv5 🚀 models. UPDATED 25 September 2022.

Before You Start

Clone repo and install requirements.txt in a Python>=3.7.0 environment, including PyTorch>=1.7. 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:

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.

Environments

YOLOv5 may be run in any of the following up-to-date verified environments (with all dependencies including CUDA/CUDNN, Python and PyTorch preinstalled):

• Notebooks with free GPU:
• Google Cloud Deep Learning VM. See GCP Quickstart Guide
• Amazon Deep Learning AMI. See AWS Quickstart Guide
• Docker Image. See Docker Quickstart Guide

Status

If this badge is green, all YOLOv5 GitHub Actions Continuous Integration (CI) tests are currently passing. CI tests verify correct operation of YOLOv5 training, validation, inference, export and benchmarks on MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu every 24 hours and on every commit.

[glenn-jocher]

@bryanbocao hi there,

Thank you for reaching out. You are correct that the current pruning method in YOLOv5 uses unstructured pruning, where filters with small weight magnitude are set to 0s, while they are still stored in the weight file. As a result, the model file size may not change significantly, and inference speed may not be improved unless the code has an explicit way to accelerate like skipping those zeros.

Structure pruning, on the other hand, removes those zeros after pruning to save both space and time. However, implementing structure pruning may not be easy due to the dependency among layers in various network architectures.

We appreciate your feedback on this issue, and we'll keep it in mind as we continue to improve YOLOv5. If you have any further questions or concerns, don't hesitate to let us know.

Best, [Your name/Team name]

[relaxtheo]

@bryanbocao @glenn-jocher Thank you all very much, I will try your recommendations

[glenn-jocher]

@relaxtheo Thank you for reaching out, and we're glad to hear that our recommendations were helpful. Don't hesitate to let us know if you have any further questions or concerns. We're here to help!

[Mary14-design]

It may be a bit unrelated but I am similar error while trying to do training. I am still new to the yolo models. Can you help me please with solving it?

[glenn-jocher]

@Mary14-design it seems like there might be an issue with the image link you've provided; it's not displaying correctly. However, I'm here to help you with your training issue. Could you please provide more details about the error message you're encountering during training with YOLOv5? This will help me understand the problem better and assist you accordingly. If you can copy and paste the error message or describe the issue in more detail, that would be great.