Introduced in the late 1980s for generalization purposes, pruning has now become a staple for compressing deep neural networks. Despite many innovations in recent decades, pruning approaches still face core issues that hinder their performance or scalability. Drawing inspiration from early work in the field, and especially the use of weight decay to achieve sparsity, we introduce Selective Weight Decay (SWD), which carries out efficient, continuous pruning throughout training. Our approach, theoretically grounded on Lagrangian smoothing, is versatile and can be applied to multiple tasks, networks, and pruning structures. We show that SWD compares favorably to state-of-the-art approaches, in terms of performance-to-parameters ratio, on the CIFAR-10, Cora, and ImageNet ILSVRC2012 datasets.
@article{arxiv.2011.10520,
title = {Rethinking Weight Decay For Efficient Neural Network Pruning},
author = {Hugo Tessier and Vincent Gripon and Mathieu Léonardon and Matthieu Arzel and Thomas Hannagan and David Bertrand},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.10520},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
23 pages, 18 figures, published at Journal of Imaging, update : added new results, rewrite