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The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-02 Torsten Hoefler , Dan Alistarh , Tal Ben-Nun , Nikoli Dryden , Alexandra Peste

Recently, sparse training methods have started to be established as a de facto approach for training and inference efficiency in artificial neural networks. Yet, this efficiency is just in theory. In practice, everyone uses a binary mask to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Selima Curci , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Mykola Pechenizkiyi

Pruning large neural networks to create high-quality, independently trainable sparse masks, which can maintain similar performance to their dense counterparts, is very desirable due to the reduced space and time complexity. As research…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-29 Ajay Jaiswal , Haoyu Ma , Tianlong Chen , Ying Ding , Zhangyang Wang

Random pruning is arguably the most naive way to attain sparsity in neural networks, but has been deemed uncompetitive by either post-training pruning or sparse training. In this paper, we focus on sparse training and highlight a perhaps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-08 Shiwei Liu , Tianlong Chen , Xiaohan Chen , Li Shen , Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Zhangyang Wang , Mykola Pechenizkiy

We propose a simple yet effective technique to simplify the training and the resulting model of neural networks. In back propagation, only a small subset of the full gradient is computed to update the model parameters. The gradient vectors…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-03-13 Xu Sun , Xuancheng Ren , Shuming Ma , Bingzhen Wei , Wei Li , Jingjing Xu , Houfeng Wang , Yi Zhang

Large language models have demonstrated capabilities in text generation, while their increasing parameter scales present challenges in computational and memory efficiency. Post-training sparsity (PTS), which reduces model cost by removing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Minhao Jiang , Zhikai Li , Xuewen Liu , Jing Zhang , Mengjuan Chen , Qingyi Gu

Neural network models are widely used in solving many challenging problems, such as computer vision, personalized recommendation, and natural language processing. Those models are very computationally intensive and reach the hardware limit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-28 Fei Sun , Minghai Qin , Tianyun Zhang , Liu Liu , Yen-Kuang Chen , Yuan Xie

Pruning of deep neural networks has been an effective technique for reducing model size while preserving most of the performance of dense networks, crucial for deploying models on memory and power-constrained devices. While recent sparse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Andy Li , Aiden Durrant , Milan Markovic , Tianjin Huang , Souvik Kundu , Tianlong Chen , Lu Yin , Georgios Leontidis

Due to the significant computational challenge of training large-scale graph neural networks (GNNs), various sparse learning techniques have been exploited to reduce memory and storage costs. Examples include \textit{graph sparsification}…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-07 Shuai Zhang , Meng Wang , Pin-Yu Chen , Sijia Liu , Songtao Lu , Miao Liu

Modern Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are complex, encompassing millions of parameters. Their deployment exerts computational, storage and energy demands, particularly on embedded platforms. Existing approaches to prune or sparsify…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2019-09-10 Amir H. Ashouri , Tarek S. Abdelrahman , Alwyn Dos Remedios

Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is commonly used for optimization in large-scale machine learning problems. Langford et al. (2009) introduce a sparse online learning method to induce sparsity via truncated gradient. With high-dimensional…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-10 Yuting Ma , Tian Zheng

Sparse neural networks are important for achieving better generalization and enhancing computation efficiency. This paper proposes a novel learning approach to obtain sparse fully connected layers in neural networks (NNs) automatically. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-28 Mengqiao Han , Xiabi Liu , Zhaoyang Hai , Zhengwen Li

Fully finetuning foundation language models (LMs) with billions of parameters is often impractical due to high computational costs, memory requirements, and the risk of overfitting. Although methods like low-rank adapters help address these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Jonathan Svirsky , Yehonathan Refael , Ofir Lindenbaum

Finding neural network weights that generalize well from small datasets is difficult. A promising approach is to learn a weight initialization such that a small number of weight changes results in low generalization error. We show that this…

We rigorously evaluate three state-of-the-art techniques for inducing sparsity in deep neural networks on two large-scale learning tasks: Transformer trained on WMT 2014 English-to-German, and ResNet-50 trained on ImageNet. Across thousands…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-27 Trevor Gale , Erich Elsen , Sara Hooker

The growing environmental footprint of artificial intelligence (AI), especially in terms of storage and computation, calls for more frugal and interpretable models. Sparse models (e.g., linear, neural networks) offer a promising solution by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-23 Sylvain Sardy , Maxime van Cutsem , Xiaoyu Ma

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted growing interest in both computational neuroscience and artificial intelligence, primarily due to their inherent energy efficiency and compact memory footprint. However, achieving adversarial…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Luu Trong Nhan , Luu Trung Duong , Pham Ngoc Nam , Truong Cong Thang

The training of sparse neural networks is becoming an increasingly important tool for reducing the computational footprint of models at training and evaluation, as well enabling the effective scaling up of models. Whereas much work over the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-07 Jonathan Schwarz , Siddhant M. Jayakumar , Razvan Pascanu , Peter E. Latham , Yee Whye Teh

Since sparse neural networks usually contain many zero weights, these unnecessary network connections can potentially be eliminated without degrading network performance. Therefore, well-designed sparse neural networks have the potential to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-14 Zhimin Tang , Linkai Luo , Bike Xie , Yiyu Zhu , Rujie Zhao , Lvqing Bi , Chao Lu

Many applications require sparse neural networks due to space or inference time restrictions. There is a large body of work on training dense networks to yield sparse networks for inference, but this limits the size of the largest trainable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-07-26 Utku Evci , Trevor Gale , Jacob Menick , Pablo Samuel Castro , Erich Elsen