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Overfitting is one of the fundamental challenges when training convolutional neural networks and is usually identified by a diverging training and test loss. The underlying dynamics of how the flow of activations induce overfitting is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-14 Karim Huesmann , Luis Garcia Rodriguez , Lars Linsen , Benjamin Risse

The demand for efficient large language model (LLM) inference has intensified the focus on sparsification techniques. While semi-structured (N:M) pruning is well-established for weights, its application to activation pruning remains…

Efficient inference with transformer-based models remains a challenge, especially in vision tasks like object detection. We analyze the inherent sparsity in the MLP layers of DETR and introduce two methods to exploit it without retraining.…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Reza Sedghi , Anand Subramoney , David Kappel

We introduce a simple post-training method that makes transformer attention sparse without sacrificing performance. Applying a flexible sparsity regularisation under a constrained-loss objective, we show on models up to 7B parameters that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Florent Draye , Anson Lei , Hsiao-Ru Pan , Ingmar Posner , Bernhard Schölkopf

Transformers use the dense self-attention mechanism which gives a lot of flexibility for long-range connectivity. Over multiple layers of a deep transformer, the number of possible connectivity patterns increases exponentially. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-05 Md Shamim Hussain , Mohammed J. Zaki , Dharmashankar Subramanian

Efficient time series forecasting has become critical for real-world applications, particularly with deep neural networks (DNNs). Efficiency in DNNs can be achieved through sparse connectivity and reducing the model size. However, finding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Zahra Atashgahi , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Raymond Veldhuis , Decebal Constantin Mocanu

Sparse training has received an upsurging interest in machine learning due to its tantalizing saving potential for the entire training process as well as inference. Dynamic sparse training (DST), as a leading sparse training approach, can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Lu Yin , Gen Li , Meng Fang , Li Shen , Tianjin Huang , Zhangyang Wang , Vlado Menkovski , Xiaolong Ma , Mykola Pechenizkiy , Shiwei Liu

Existing approaches to increasing the effective depth of Transformers predominantly rely on parameter reuse, extending computation through recursive execution. Under this paradigm, the network structure remains static along the training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Yao Chen , Yilong Chen , Yinqi Yang , Junyuan Shang , Zhenyu Zhang , Zefeng Zhang , Shuaiyi Nie , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , HaiFeng Wang , Tingwen Liu

The pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm has contributed to a number of breakthroughs in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Instead of directly training on a downstream task, language models are first pre-trained on large datasets with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Vithursan Thangarasa , Abhay Gupta , William Marshall , Tianda Li , Kevin Leong , Dennis DeCoste , Sean Lie , Shreyas Saxena

We propose SLoPe, a Double-Pruned Sparse Plus Lazy Low-rank Adapter Pretraining method for LLMs that improves the accuracy of sparse LLMs while accelerating their pretraining and inference and reducing their memory footprint. Sparse…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-28 Mohammad Mozaffari , Amir Yazdanbakhsh , Zhao Zhang , Maryam Mehri Dehnavi

Although deep convolutional neural networks have achieved rapid development, it is challenging to widely promote and apply these models on low-power devices, due to computational and storage limitations. To address this issue, researchers…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Xiaolong Yu , Cong Tian

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) extract human-interpretable features from deep neural networks by transforming their activations into a sparse, higher dimensional latent space, and then reconstructing the activations from these latents.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Gonçalo Paulo , Stepan Shabalin , Nora Belrose

Contemporary Deep Neural Network (DNN) contains millions of synaptic connections with tens to hundreds of layers. The large computation and memory requirements pose a challenge to the hardware design. In this work, we leverage the intrinsic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-11-07 Jingyang Zhu , Jingbo Jiang , Xizi Chen , Chi-Ying Tsui

Neural networks have proven to be extremely powerful tools for modern artificial intelligence applications, but computational and storage complexity remain limiting factors. This paper presents two compatible contributions towards reducing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Sourya Dey , Kuan-Wen Huang , Peter A. Beerel , Keith M. Chugg

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

Vision transformers (ViTs) have recently received explosive popularity, but their enormous model sizes and training costs remain daunting. Conventional post-training pruning often incurs higher training budgets. In contrast, this paper aims…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Tianlong Chen , Yu Cheng , Zhe Gan , Lu Yuan , Lei Zhang , Zhangyang Wang

Training deep neural networks (DNNs) is costly. Fortunately, Nvidia Ampere and Hopper GPUs can accelerate matrix multiplications twice as fast as a dense equivalent by implementing 2:4 sparsity. However, previous STE-based 2:4 pre-training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Yuezhou Hu , Jun Zhu , Jianfei Chen

A fundamental task for artificial intelligence is learning. Deep Neural Networks have proven to cope perfectly with all learning paradigms, i.e. supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning. Nevertheless, traditional deep learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-03 Decebal Constantin Mocanu , Elena Mocanu , Tiago Pinto , Selima Curci , Phuong H. Nguyen , Madeleine Gibescu , Damien Ernst , Zita A. Vale

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as a promising approach for learning interpretable features from neural network activations. However, the optimization landscape for SAE training can be challenging due to correlations in the input…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Ashwin Saraswatula , David Klindt

Previous work has demonstrated that MLPs within ReLU Transformers exhibit high levels of sparsity, with many of their activations equal to zero for any given token. We build on that work to more deeply explore how token-level sparsity…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Cody Wild , Jesper Anderson