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Research aimed at scaling up neuroscience inspired learning algorithms for neural networks is accelerating. Recently, a key research area has been the study of energy-based learning algorithms such as predictive coding, due to their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Luca Pinchetti , Simon Frieder , Thomas Lukasiewicz , Tommaso Salvatori

We report, for the first time, on the cascade weight shedding phenomenon in deep neural networks where in response to pruning a small percentage of a network's weights, a large percentage of the remaining is shed over a few epochs during…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-22 Kambiz Azarian , Fatih Porikli

Recently, a race towards the simplification of deep networks has begun, showing that it is effectively possible to reduce the size of these models with minimal or no performance loss. However, there is a general lack in understanding why…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-29 Enzo Tartaglione , Andrea Bragagnolo , Marco Grangetto

Synaptic pruning in biological brains removes weak connections to improve efficiency. In contrast, dropout regularization in artificial neural networks randomly deactivates neurons without considering activity-dependent pruning. We propose…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Gideon Vos , Liza van Eijk , Zoltan Sarnyai , Mostafa Rahimi Azghadi

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) suffer from different issues, such as computational complexity and the number of parameters. In recent years pruning techniques are employed to reduce the number of operations and model size in CNNs.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-01-14 Morteza Mousa Pasandi , Mohsen Hajabdollahi , Nader Karimi , Shadrokh Samavi

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework for solving complex real-world problems. Large neural networks employed in the framework are traditionally associated with better generalization capabilities, but their increased size…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-03 Samin Yeasar Arnob , Riyasat Ohib , Sergey Plis , Doina Precup

Initialization of neural network parameters, such as weights and biases, has a crucial impact on learning performance; if chosen well, we can even avoid the need for additional training with backpropagation. For example, algorithms based on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hikaru Homma , Jun Ohkubo

Regularization has long been utilized to learn sparsity in deep neural network pruning. However, its role is mainly explored in the small penalty strength regime. In this work, we extend its application to a new scenario where the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Huan Wang , Can Qin , Yulun Zhang , Yun Fu

Pruning methods have recently grown in popularity as an effective way to reduce the size and computational complexity of deep neural networks. Large numbers of parameters can be removed from trained models with little discernible loss in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-18 Tim Whitaker , Darrell Whitley

The widespread availability of pre-trained vision models has enabled numerous deep learning applications through their transferable representations. However, their computational and storage costs often limit practical deployment.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Leonardo Iurada , Beatrice Occhiena , Tatiana Tommasi

Many recent works have shown trainability plays a central role in neural network pruning -- unattended broken trainability can lead to severe under-performance and unintentionally amplify the effect of retraining learning rate, resulting in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-06 Huan Wang , Yun Fu

Pruning is a popular technique for reducing the model size and computational cost of convolutional neural networks (CNNs). However, a slow retraining or fine-tuning procedure is often required to recover the accuracy loss caused by pruning.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-01 Yaohui Cai , Weizhe Hua , Hongzheng Chen , G. Edward Suh , Christopher De Sa , Zhiru Zhang

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are usually over-parameterized, causing excessive memory and interconnection cost on the hardware platform. Existing pruning approaches remove secondary parameters at the end of training to reduce the model size;…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Gokul Krishnan , Xiaocong Du , Yu Cao

Regularization techniques such as $\mathcal{L}_1$ and $\mathcal{L}_2$ regularizers are effective in sparsifying neural networks (NNs). However, to remove a certain neuron or channel in NNs, all weight elements related to that neuron or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-31 Ali Haisam Muhammad Rafid , Adrian Sandu

When approaching a novel visual recognition problem in a specialized image domain, a common strategy is to start with a pre-trained deep neural network and fine-tune it to the specialized domain. If the target domain covers a smaller visual…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-07-31 Frederick Tung , Srikanth Muralidharan , Greg Mori

Neuron pruning is widely used to reduce the computational cost and parameter footprint of large language models, yet it remains unclear whether neurons in task-specific models contribute uniformly to task performance. In this work, we…

Large neural networks are heavily over-parameterized. This is done because it improves training to optimality. However once the network is trained, this means many parameters can be zeroed, or pruned, leaving an equivalent sparse neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-12 Michael G. Rawson

Lottery ticket hypothesis for deep neural networks emphasizes the importance of initialization used to re-train the sparser networks obtained using the iterative magnitude pruning process. An explanation for why the specific initialization…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Tausifa Jan Saleem , Ramanjit Ahuja , Surendra Prasad , Brejesh Lall

Pruning and quantization techniques have been broadly successful in reducing the number of parameters needed for large neural networks, yet theoretical justification for their empirical success falls short. We consider a randomized greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Houssam El Cheairi , David Gamarnik , Rahul Mazumder

Neural network pruning techniques reduce the number of parameters without compromising predicting ability of a network. Many algorithms have been developed for pruning both over-parameterized fully-connected networks (FCNs) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-24 Xin Qian , Diego Klabjan