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Deep neural networks often suffer from poor generalization due to complex and non-convex loss landscapes. Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) is a popular solution that smooths the loss landscape by minimizing the maximized change of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-07-03 Peng Mi , Li Shen , Tianhe Ren , Yiyi Zhou , Tianshuo Xu , Xiaoshuai Sun , Tongliang Liu , Rongrong Ji , Dacheng Tao

Sparsification is an efficient approach to accelerate CNN inference, but it is challenging to take advantage of sparsity in training procedure because the involved gradients are dynamically changed. Actually, an important observation shows…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Xucheng Ye , Pengcheng Dai , Junyu Luo , Xin Guo , Yingjie Qi , Jianlei Yang , Yiran Chen

Modern deep neural networks have a large number of parameters, making them very hard to train. We propose DSD, a dense-sparse-dense training flow, for regularizing deep neural networks and achieving better optimization performance. In the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2017-02-23 Song Han , Jeff Pool , Sharan Narang , Huizi Mao , Enhao Gong , Shijian Tang , Erich Elsen , Peter Vajda , Manohar Paluri , John Tran , Bryan Catanzaro , William J. Dally

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) are highly regarded for their energy efficiency, inherent activation sparsity, and suitability for real-time processing in edge devices. However, most current SNN methods adopt architectures resembling…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Yesmine Abdennadher , Giovanni Perin , Riccardo Mazzieri , Jacopo Pegoraro , Michele Rossi

Activation functions influence behavior and performance of DNNs. Nonlinear activation functions, like Rectified Linear Units (ReLU), Exponential Linear Units (ELU) and Scaled Exponential Linear Units (SELU), outperform the linear…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-02-05 Alberto Marchisio , Muhammad Abdullah Hanif , Semeen Rehman , Maurizio Martina , Muhammad Shafique

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

While deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven to be efficient for numerous tasks, they come at a high memory and computation cost, thus making them impractical on resource-limited devices. However, these networks are known to contain a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-07-21 Anthony Berthelier , Yongzhe Yan , Thierry Chateau , Christophe Blanc , Stefan Duffner , Christophe Garcia

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

Recent research has focused on weight sparsity in deep neural network training to reduce FLOPs, aiming for improved efficiency (test accuracy w.r.t training FLOPs). However, sparse weight training often compromises accuracy, requiring…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-19 Vithursan Thangarasa , Shreyas Saxena , Abhay Gupta , Sean Lie

Sparse activation, which selectively activates only an input-dependent set of neurons in inference, is a useful technique to reduce the computing cost of Large Language Models (LLMs) without retraining or adaptation efforts. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Jifeng Song , Kai Huang , Xiangyu Yin , Boyuan Yang , Wei Gao

This article does not propose any novel algorithm or new hardware for sparsity. Instead, it aims to serve the "common good" for the increasingly prosperous Sparse Neural Network (SNN) research community. We attempt to summarize some most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-27 Shiwei Liu , Zhangyang Wang

The emergence of deep and large-scale spiking neural networks (SNNs) exhibiting high performance across diverse complex datasets has led to a need for compressing network models due to the presence of a significant number of redundant…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Yaxin Li , Qi Xu , Jiangrong Shen , Hongming Xu , Long Chen , Gang Pan

Pre-trained Transformers inherently possess the characteristic of sparse activation, where only a small fraction of the neurons are activated for each token. While sparse activation has been explored through post-training methods, its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Zhengyan Zhang , Chaojun Xiao , Qiujieli Qin , Yankai Lin , Zhiyuan Zeng , Xu Han , Zhiyuan Liu , Ruobing Xie , Maosong Sun , Jie Zhou

The highly sparse activations in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) can provide tremendous energy efficiency benefits when carefully exploited in hardware. The behavior of sparsity in SNNs is uniquely shaped by the dataset and training…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-12 Ilkin Aliyev , Tosiron Adegbija

Leveraging sparsity is crucial for optimizing large language model inference. however, modern LLMs employing SiLU as their activation function exhibit minimal activation sparsity. Recent research has proposed replacing SiLU with ReLU to…

Performance · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Jiho Shin , Hoeseok Yang , Youngmin Yi

Structural neural network pruning aims to remove the redundant channels in the deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) by pruning the filters of less importance to the final output accuracy. To reduce the degradation of performance after…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-10-23 Nanfei Jiang , Xu Zhao , Chaoyang Zhao , Yongqi An , Ming Tang , Jinqiao Wang

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

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are reported to be overparametrized. The search for optimal (minimal) and sufficient architecture is an NP-hard problem as the hyperparameter space for possible network configurations is vast. Here, we…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Tin Barisin , Illia Horenko

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have gained great attraction due to their distinctive properties of low power consumption and fast inference on neuromorphic hardware. As the most effective method to get deep SNNs, ANN-SNN conversion has…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-03-09 Tong Bu , Wei Fang , Jianhao Ding , PengLin Dai , Zhaofei Yu , Tiejun Huang

We develop an approach to growing deep network architectures over the course of training, driven by a principled combination of accuracy and sparsity objectives. Unlike existing pruning or architecture search techniques that operate on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-07 Xin Yuan , Pedro Savarese , Michael Maire