DRNet: Dissect and Reconstruct the Convolutional Neural Network via Interpretable Manners

This paper proposes to use an interpretable method to dissect the channels of a large-scale convolutional neural networks (CNNs) into class-wise parts, and reconstruct a CNN using some of these parts. The dissection and reconstruction process can be done in very short time on state-of-the-art networks such as VGG and MobileNetV2. This method allows users to run parts of a CNN according to specific application scenarios, instead of running the whole network or retraining a new one for every task. Experiments on Cifar and ILSVRC 2012 show that the reconstructed CNN runs more efficiently than the original one and achieve a better accuracy. Interpretability analyses show that our method is a new way of applying CNNs on tasks with given knowledge.