English

Deep Rewiring: Training very sparse deep networks

Neural and Evolutionary Computing 2018-08-09 v5 Artificial Intelligence Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Machine Learning Machine Learning

Abstract

Neuromorphic hardware tends to pose limits on the connectivity of deep networks that one can run on them. But also generic hardware and software implementations of deep learning run more efficiently for sparse networks. Several methods exist for pruning connections of a neural network after it was trained without connectivity constraints. We present an algorithm, DEEP R, that enables us to train directly a sparsely connected neural network. DEEP R automatically rewires the network during supervised training so that connections are there where they are most needed for the task, while its total number is all the time strictly bounded. We demonstrate that DEEP R can be used to train very sparse feedforward and recurrent neural networks on standard benchmark tasks with just a minor loss in performance. DEEP R is based on a rigorous theoretical foundation that views rewiring as stochastic sampling of network configurations from a posterior.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1711.05136,
  title  = {Deep Rewiring: Training very sparse deep networks},
  author = {Guillaume Bellec and David Kappel and Wolfgang Maass and Robert Legenstein},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1711.05136},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication at ICLR 2018. 10 pages (12 with references, 24 with appendix), 4 Figures in the main text. Reviews are available at: https://openreview.net/forum?id=BJ_wN01C- . This recent version contains minor corrections in the appendix

R2 v1 2026-06-22T22:45:38.387Z