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This paper presents a dynamic network rewiring (DNR) method to generate pruned deep neural network (DNN) models that are robust against adversarial attacks yet maintain high accuracy on clean im- ages. In particular, the disclosed DNR method is based on a unified constrained optimization formulation using a hybrid loss function that merges ultra-high model compression with robust adversar- ial training. This training strategy dynamically adjusts inter-layer connectivity based on per-layer normalized momentum computed from the hybrid loss function. In contrast to existing robust pruning frameworks that require multiple training iterations, the proposed learning strategy achieves an overall target pruning ratio with only a single training iteration and can be tuned to support both irregu- lar and structured channel pruning. To evaluate the merits of DNR, experiments were performed with two widely accepted models, namely VGG16 and ResNet-18, on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 as well as with VGG16 on Tiny-ImageNet. Compared to the baseline un- compressed models, DNR provides over 20× compression on all the datasets with no significant drop in either clean or adversarial classification accuracy. Moreover, our experiments show that DNR consistently finds compressed models with better clean and adver- sarial image classification performance than what is achievable through state-of-the-art alternatives. Our models and test codes are available at https://github.com/ksouvik52/DNR_ASP_DAC2021. 

The high energy cost of processing deep convolutional neural networks impedes their ubiquitous deployment in energy-constrained platforms such as embedded systems and IoT devices. This article introduces convolutional layers with pre-defined sparse 2D kernels that have support sets that repeat periodically within and across filters. Due to the efficient storage of our periodic sparse kernels, the parameter savings can translate into considerable improvements in energy efficiency due to reduced DRAM accesses, thus promising significant improvements in the trade-off between energy consumption and accuracy for both training and inference. To evaluate this approach, we performed experiments with two widely accepted datasets, CIFAR-10 and Tiny ImageNet in sparse variants of the ResNet18 and VGG16 architectures. Compared to baseline models, our proposed sparse variants require up to ∼82% fewer model parameters with 5.6× fewer FLOPs with negligible loss in accuracy for ResNet18 on CIFAR-10. For VGG16 trained on Tiny ImageNet, our approach requires 5.8× fewer FLOPs and up to ∼83.3% fewer model parameters with a drop in top-5 (top-1) accuracy of only 1.2% ( ∼2.1% ). We also compared the performance of our proposed architectures with that of ShuffleNet and MobileNetV2. Using similar hyperparameters and FLOPs, our ResNet18 variants yield an average accuracy improvement of ∼2.8% .