Pruning neural network parameters is often viewed as a means to compress models, but pruning has also been motivated by the desire to prevent overfitting. This motivation is particularly relevant given the perhaps surprising observation that a wide variety of pruning approaches increase test accuracy despite sometimes …
A new method to prune neural networks with iterative randomization improves efficiency.
problem Efficiency in pruning randomly initialized neural networks.
method Iteratively randomizing weight values to reduce parameter requirements.
result The method achieves remarkable performance with fewer parameters.
A new framework explains why early pruning works well.
problem Understanding why early pruning of neural networks leads to good performance.
method Gradient flow framework to unify pruning measures.
result Magnitude-based pruning removes least contributing parameters, leading to faster convergence.
ICE-Pruning accelerates deep neural network pruning by 9.61x.
problem Efficiently pruning deep neural networks while maintaining accuracy.
method Iterative pruning with automatic fine-tuning steps, freezing strategy, and custom learning rate scheduler.
result Significantly reduces pruning time by up to 9.61x.
New statistical mechanics analysis shows edge pruning outperforms node pruning in neural networks.
problem Theoretical understanding of neural network pruning effectiveness is lacking.
method Statistical mechanics analysis of a teacher-student framework.
result DPP node pruning method is superior to other methods, but edge pruning is better overall.
Pruning is a standard technique for removing unnecessary structure from a neural network to reduce its storage footprint, computational demands, or energy consumption. Pruning can reduce the parameter-counts of many state-of-the-art neural networks by an order of magnitude without compromising accuracy, meaning these n…
A model predicts how hyperparameters affect pruning performance.
problem Predicting the impact of hyperparameters on pruning performance.
method Phenomenological model using temperature-like and load-like parameters.
result A sharp transition phenomenon in pruning performance.
Alpha-trimming prunes trees in random forests to improve predictive performance.
problem Improving predictive performance of random forests by locally adaptive tree pruning.
method Alpha-trimming is a fast pruning algorithm that prunes trees in a random forest based on signal-to-noise ratio, controlled by a tuning parameter.
result Alpha-trimming often lowers mean squared prediction error compared to fully grown random forests.
Artificial neural networks (ANNs) may not be worth their computational/memory costs when used in mobile phones or embedded devices. Parameter-pruning algorithms combat these costs, with some algorithms capable of removing over 90% of an ANN's weights without harming the ANN's performance. Removing weights from an ANN i…
ANPyC combats forgetting by pruning and consolidating neural parameters.
problem Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, especially with long-term tasks.
method Adversarial Neural Pruning and Synaptic Consolidation (ANPyC) to balance task-relevant and irrelevant parameters.
result ANPyC prevents forgetting while enabling efficient learning of multiple tasks.
New insights on pruning deep networks by preserving function locality.
problem Designing effective pruning methods for deep neural networks.
method Revisited loss modeling using first and second order Taylor expansions, emphasizing locality.
result Both first and second order Taylor expansions can achieve similar performance in pruning.
New pruning method retains model expressiveness for NLP tasks.
problem Pruning large pretrained transformer models for real-world deployment.
method Mixture Gaussian Prior Pruning (MGPP) algorithm.
result MGPP outperforms existing pruning methods in high sparsity settings.
Renormalized pruning improves neural network accuracy.
problem Over-parameterized neural networks waste many parameters.
method Propose renormalizing sparse neural networks.
result Renormalized pruning converges to zero error.
i-SpaSP prunes neural networks by identifying important groups of parameters, improving pruning efficiency.
problem Pruning neural networks to reduce computational cost and improve performance.
method i-SpaSP uses sparse signal recovery principles to iteratively identify and threshold important parameter groups.
result i-SpaSP achieves strong empirical results and theoretical convergence guarantees, improving pruning efficiency.
TENP prunes experts and neurons in Mixture-of-Experts models for efficient deployment.
problem Efficient deployment of large language models constrained by static parameter footprint.
method Structured Trapezoidal ExpertNeuron Pruning (TENP) identifies and retains important experts and neurons.
result DeepSeek model achieves 10% better performance on code generation tasks with 40% expert sparsity.
Parameter pruning is a promising approach for CNN compression and acceleration by eliminating redundant model parameters with tolerable performance degrade. Despite its effectiveness, existing regularization-based parameter pruning methods usually drive weights towards zero with large and constant regularization factor…
Pruning at initialization fails to find sparse subnetworks, revealing information-theoretic barriers.
problem Difficulty in finding sparse subnetworks without training the full model.
method Analysis of effective parameter count and mutual information between sparsity mask and data.
result Pruning at initialization cannot find sparse subnetworks due to high mutual information.
A new energy-efficient pruning method for federated learning.
problem Energy inefficiency in gradient sparsification for federated learning.
method Formalized energy-constrained projection problem and proposed Cost-Weighted Magnitude Pruning (CWMP).
result CWMP optimally balances performance and energy efficiency in federated learning.
Paper proposes efficient network pruning method for deep neural networks.
problem High computational and memory cost of deep neural networks.
method Annealing and direct sparsity control for channel-level pruning.
result Proposed method achieves better or competitive performance compared to other methods.
Deep Neural Network (DNN) is powerful but computationally expensive and memory intensive, thus impeding its practical usage on resource-constrained front-end devices. DNN pruning is an approach for deep model compression, which aims at eliminating some parameters with tolerable performance degradation. In this paper, w…
DNN pruning reduces memory footprint and computational work of DNN-based solutions to improve performance and energy-efficiency. An effective pruning scheme should be able to systematically remove connections and/or neurons that are unnecessary or redundant, reducing the DNN size without any loss in accuracy. In this p…
Pruning unimportant parameters can allow deep neural networks (DNNs) to reduce their heavy computation and memory requirements. A saliency metric estimates which parameters can be safely pruned with little impact on the classification performance of the DNN. Many saliency metrics have been proposed, each within the con…
ResRep prunes CNNs without losing accuracy by separating remembering and forgetting.
problem Pruning CNNs to reduce FLOPs without sacrificing accuracy.
method Decoupling remembering and forgetting in CNNs, using SGD for remembering and a novel update rule for forgetting.
result Achieved lossless pruning with high compression ratio (76.15% accuracy on ImageNet with 45% FLOPs reduction).
This paper studies a theoretical pruning method for RNNs to reduce computational costs.
problem High computational costs in recurrent neural networks (RNNs).
method Spectral pruning inspired approach for RNNs.
result Generalization error bounds for compressed RNNs are provided.
Dirichlet pruning compresses neural networks by removing unimportant units.
problem Compressing large neural network models without sacrificing performance.
method Assigns Dirichlet distribution over network layers' units and uses variational inference to estimate parameters.
result Achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on larger architectures like VGG and ResNet.
Neural network pruning lacks standardized benchmarks and metrics.
problem Lack of standardized benchmarks and metrics in neural network pruning.
method Meta-analysis of 81 papers, controlled conditions, ShrinkBench framework.
result Neural network pruning community lacks standardized benchmarks and metrics.
In this paper, we propose a novel progressive parameter pruning method for Convolutional Neural Network acceleration, named Structured Probabilistic Pruning (SPP), which effectively prunes weights of convolutional layers in a probabilistic manner. Unlike existing deterministic pruning approaches, where unimportant weig…
Recent DNN pruning algorithms have succeeded in reducing the number of parameters in fully connected layers, often with little or no drop in classification accuracy. However, most of the existing pruning schemes either have to be applied during training or require a costly retraining procedure after pruning to regain c…
Network pruning is a promising avenue for compressing deep neural networks. A typical approach to pruning starts by training a model and then removing redundant parameters while minimizing the impact on what is learned. Alternatively, a recent approach shows that pruning can be done at initialization prior to training,…
Pruning neural networks adds differential privacy noise, preserving data utility.
problem Achieving differential privacy in neural networks without sacrificing data utility.
method Proving equivalence between pruning and adding differential privacy noise to hidden-layer activations.
result Pruning can be a more effective alternative to adding differential privacy noise for neural networks.
Real-time pruning during training reduces network size and training time.
problem Efficiently reducing neural network size without sacrificing accuracy.
method Activation density-based pruning during training.
result Up to 200x reduction in parameters and 60x reduction in inference compute operations.
Deep Neural Networks are highly over-parameterized and the size of the neural networks can be reduced significantly after training without any decrease in performance. One can clearly see this phenomenon in a wide range of architectures trained for various problems. Weight/channel pruning, distillation, quantization, m…
Paper proposes efficient pruning method for neural networks.
problem Compressing deep neural networks for resource-constrained devices.
method Adaptive sparsity loss for budget-aware optimization during training.
result Demonstrated effectiveness on various architectures and datasets.
Paper explores pruning and quantisation to compress neural networks.
problem Reduces computational and memory costs of deep neural networks.
method Investigates network pruning and quantisation for AlexNet, ShuffleNet, and MobileNet.
result Pruning and quantisation compress networks to less than half their size and improve efficiency.
AlphaPruning optimizes LLM pruning using HT-SR theory for better performance.
problem Improving pruning of large language models to reduce size without sacrificing performance.
method AlphaPruning uses HT-SR theory to allocate layerwise sparsity ratios more theoretically.
result AlphaPruning prunes LLaMA-7B to 80% sparsity with reasonable perplexity.
Pruning is an efficient model compression technique to remove redundancy in the connectivity of deep neural networks (DNNs). Computations using sparse matrices obtained by pruning parameters, however, exhibit vastly different parallelism depending on the index representation scheme. As a result, fine-grained pruning ha…
Survey on reducing deep neural network training complexity.
problem Efficient training of large deep neural networks.
method Pruning and freezing parts of the network during training.
result Dimensionality reduction improves training efficiency.
Dynamic pruning during training reduces deep network complexity without significant accuracy loss.
problem High memory and computational requirements of deep networks during training and inference.
method Dynamic pruning of convolutional filters during training, using L1 normalization for optimization.
result L1 normalization-based pruning yields up to 50% reduction in filters with minimal accuracy loss.
We introduce a pruning algorithm that provably sparsifies the parameters of a trained model in a way that approximately preserves the model's predictive accuracy. Our algorithm uses a small batch of input points to construct a data-informed importance sampling distribution over the network's parameters, and adaptively …
A new method prunes neural networks efficiently without losing effectiveness.
problem Efficient pruning of neural networks without sacrificing performance.
method Deterministic approximation of binary gates and L0 regularization. result Pruning neural networks significantly without loss in effectiveness.
Convolutional Neural Networks(CNNs) are both computation and memory intensive which hindered their deployment in mobile devices. Inspired by the relevant concept in neural science literature, we propose Synaptic Pruning: a data-driven method to prune connections between input and output feature maps with a newly propos…
This paper analyzes privacy risks in neural network pruning and proposes a defense mechanism.
problem Privacy risks in neural network pruning due to membership inference attacks.
method Investigates the impact of pruning on prediction divergence and proposes a self-attention membership inference attack.
result Proposed defense mechanism mitigates privacy risks while maintaining sparsity and accuracy.
FlipOut prunes neural networks by flipping weights' signs, achieving high sparsity.
problem Redundant weights in neural networks increase training time and resource usage.
method Uses sign flips during training to determine weight saliency for pruning.
result Competitive with existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance for high sparsity.
Optimization-based pruning eliminates backpropagation for large language models.
problem Suboptimal pruning performance due to heuristic metrics.
method Optimization of Bernoulli distribution to learn pruning masks without backpropagation.
result Efficient pruning of large language models with improved performance.
Reducing the test time resource requirements of a neural network while preserving test accuracy is crucial for running inference on resource-constrained devices. To achieve this goal, we introduce a novel network reparameterization based on the Kronecker-factored eigenbasis (KFE), and then apply Hessian-based structure…
Structural pruning of neural network parameters reduces computation, energy, and memory transfer costs during inference. We propose a novel method that estimates the contribution of a neuron (filter) to the final loss and iteratively removes those with smaller scores. We describe two variations of our method using the …
PruneNet efficiently prunes channels in deep networks, improving accuracy and performance.
problem Improving deep neural network performance and efficiency through channel pruning.
method PruneNet uses a computationally light-weight optimization step to identify and prune channels based on layer redundancy.
result Pruned ResNet models achieve higher accuracy and better performance than non-pruned models.
A new pruning method reduces neural network computation without retraining.
problem Efficiently reduce neural network computation while maintaining accuracy.
method Structured directional pruning via perturbation orthogonal projection.
result Achieves state-of-the-art pruned accuracy without retraining.