Abstract. We present COBLA—Constrained Optimization Based Lowrank Approximation—a systematic method of fifinding an optimal lowrank approximation of a trained convolutional neural network, subject to constraints in the number of multiply-accumulate (MAC) operations and the memory footprint. COBLA optimally allocates the constrained computation resources into each layer of the approximated network. The singular value decomposition of the network weight is computed, then a binary masking variable is introduced to denote whether a particular singular value and the corresponding singular vectors are used in low-rank approximation. With this formulation, the number of the MAC operations and the memory footprint are represented as linear constraints in terms of the binary masking variables. The resulted 0-1 integer programming problem is approximately solved by sequential quadratic programming. COBLA does not introduce any hyperparameter. We empirically demonstrate that COBLA outperforms prior art using the SqueezeNet and VGG-16 architecture on the ImageNet dataset