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To prune, or not to prune: exploring the efficacy of pruning for model compression

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
abstract

Model pruning seeks to induce sparsity in a deep neural network's various connection matrices, thereby reducing the number of nonzero-valued parameters in the model. Recent reports (Han et al., 2015; Narang et al., 2017) prune deep networks at the cost of only a marginal loss in accuracy and achieve a sizable reduction in model size. This hints at the possibility that the baseline models in these experiments are perhaps severely over-parameterized at the outset and a viable alternative for model compression might be to simply reduce the number of hidden units while maintaining the model's dense connection structure, exposing a similar trade-off in model size and accuracy. We investigate these two distinct paths for model compression within the context of energy-efficient inference in resource-constrained environments and propose a new gradual pruning technique that is simple and straightforward to apply across a variety of models/datasets with minimal tuning and can be seamlessly incorporated within the training process. We compare the accuracy of large, but pruned models (large-sparse) and their smaller, but dense (small-dense) counterparts with identical memory footprint. Across a broad range of neural network architectures (deep CNNs, stacked LSTM, and seq2seq LSTM models), we find large-sparse models to consistently outperform small-dense models and achieve up to 10x reduction in number of non-zero parameters with minimal loss in accuracy.

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years

2026 3 2025 3

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UNVERDICTED 6

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representative citing papers

Exploring Vision Neural Network Pruning via Screening Methodology

cs.LG · 2025-02-11 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

A unified F-statistic screening and weighted evaluation method prunes both unstructured and structured parameters in FNNs and CNNs, claiming order-of-magnitude size reduction with competitive accuracy on vision datasets.

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Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.